Hell
by Lassenby
Summary: Brick goes home. Sequel to Kingdom of Man. (final Dog's Paw story) (Brick/Mordecai)
1. Thousand Cuts

Author's Note: Final book! Thanks for sticking with me for so long.

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><p><strong>Book 3: Hell<strong>

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><p>The buzzard jolted as the landing gears touched down on the tarmac, bouncing Brick in his seat. He squeezed the throttle and, after easing the craft to a halt, killed the engines. He climbed out of the cockpit with the rotors still winding down behind him.<p>

He saw that he'd put the buzzard down askew, halfway off the marks he'd been aiming for, but it wasn't bad considering he'd only been flying solo for a couple months.

"Hey, boss," a slab called, standing up from where he'd been relaxing in the shade. "How'd it go?"

"You tell me," Brick grunted as hauled a chest out of the buzzard's cockpit. It was heavy, even for him, and it banged loudly when he set it on the asphalt.

"All that?"

"Yep. An' more. Left some guys to mop up."

The raider whistled appreciatively. Brick unclamped the chest's latches and kicked it open, revealing the cache of weapons inside. He lifted out his favorite, a Hyperion shotgun with a beetle black shell. He'd already tested it out against its makers. It was a strange weapon, firing a spray of flechettes instead of standard shotgun shells, but it had shredded the Hyperion architects into pulp.

"Take what you want and pass out the rest," Brick said to the raider, who already bent over the stash with barely contained greed glittering in his eyes.

Another Slab slouched against a shipping container, nearly concealed by the shadows. Brick almost called him over, the words died in his throat when the man's head lolled toward him.

It was one of the empties. It looked past Brick, its vacant eyes fixed on some invisible point.

Brick squashed a shudder of revulsion. He crossed the roof toward the stairs, hurrying away from the mutant and the Slab picking through the weapon case. When he stood in the throne room, he stopped to look around. His throne sat before him, and the arena (so named because it was where his guards slaughtered any intruders who got this far) sprawled below. The air was full of the metallic smells of blood and buzzards.

He spotted Rocko leaning in the stairwell between the two floors, wearing a hoody, mask and helmet despite the blistering heat of afternoon. Brick bounded down the stairs, taking them two at a time, and pulled the shorter man into an embrace.

"Hey, babe," he murmured. "I missed you. I was thinkin' we could..."

A voice from the base of the stairs interrupted him. "Welcome home!—Oh."

Brick turned to the voice and saw Rocko, also wearing hoody and mask, but no helmet, and the mask pushed up over his brow to reveal the bemused twitch of his lips. "Am I interrupting something?"

Brick looked back at the bandit he held in his arms. "What the..." he said, and yanked the mask up over his head.

A Slab whose name Brick didn't know - some albino, crooked toothed nobody - grinned up at him, and said, "Sorry, sir."

Brick shoved the stranger away. "Who the hell are you? An' why're you impersonating a lieutenant?"

"Not impersonating, no, sir. Just liked his outfit, so I _emulated_ him. Rocko is a very snazzy dresser."

"Snazzy," Brick said flatly.

"Yessir."

"Well..." he frowned. "Get the hell outta here, Slab. An next time I see ya, you better be wearing somethin else."

The bandit wagged his index finger, grinning wider than ever. "I see what you're saying, sir. You're trying to tell me that I'll never develop my own sense of style if I copy Rocko. That's a good point, sir, very keen."

Rocko met Brick on the stairs and tucked an arm around his waist, a familiar puzzle completed. "Okay, Spaz, get going. Everyone knows you've got a crush on the king."

The toe-head sputtered as he pushed past Brick, hurried down the stairs, and darted out of sight.

"What the fuck is goin on around here?" Brick asked, folding his other arm around Rocko and pushing him against the wall. Even as he asked, he kissed the younger man- a peck on the lips, a nip on the jaw.

Between kisses, Rocko answered. "You'd know, if you were ever home."

Brick chuckled and nuzzled behind Rocko's ear. "You need me around here to service you?"

"Nah. I've been fucking the mailman," Rocko replied, grinning against Brick's lips.

"You're full of shit."

"Am I? You haven't been around much. Maybe I've got a boyfriend on the side. Maybe two, three boyfriends," Rocko said, letting Brick tug him along down the stairs, ducking underneath with him. It was dark under there. Light fell between the risers, casting bands of gold across the two men. Brick paused outside their secret hideaway to study Rocko.

"What?" Rocko asked. "What're you looking at?"

"Nothin. Just, I like lookin at your face. How come you always wear that mask?"

Rocko shrugged. "Donno."

"Yeah, you do. But it's been years! Most of those guys are dead now."

"Not all of them."

"Then I'll kill em! Just tell me who they are. You shouldn't have to hide your face just because of those assholes."

"Drop it. Nobody's going to kill them."

"Why not? After what they did to you, they deserve it. You gotta stop being such a pushover. You're a Slab lieutenant!"

Rocko blew out a humorless snort. "_Lieutenant_. Come on, babe. You and I both know I'm just a queen."

"That ain't true. You're the one who tells me where to go, what to do...all the shit we've pulled off against Hyperion, that was all you. You point, I go. If you didn't point, I'd just be..." Brick paused, weighing his words. "Chasin my tail."

Rocko laughed—a real laugh, this time, a bright burst of music—and slouched back against the wall, staring up at the slatted stairs above. "I'm a queen, and you're a dog," he conceded.

Brick cupped Rocko's face in both hands and pulled him into a long, languorous kiss. When they parted, Rocko had a strange expression.

This time, it was Brick's turn to ask. "What?"

"I don't know how to say this. What I said earlier, about the boyfriends...I wasn't exactly joking."

"Huh? You got a..." Brick said, and paused, because suddenly the earth seemed to gape open, threatening to swallow him. "You got a boyfriend?"

"No, not that. Just someone I'm interested in. And we haven't done anything. We flirt a little, that's all."

"Why're you tellin me this?" Brick asked.

"I don't know." Rocko blinked, shook his head. "Actually, I do. I'm just afraid to say."

"Spit it out," Brick said. His chest burned- indigestion, bile displaced by the sudden slide of his animal. It sensed his pain, and it promised reprieve. _No._ _Not Rocko_.

_Not Rocko, not Mordecai_, it seemed to hiss, slinking back into the depths of Brick's unconscious. _You never let me have any fun..._

"We've been together for a long time, but what are we? King and queen? Commander and Lieutenant?" Rocko asked. "What am I to you?"

"You're...you're my..." Brick's hand reached automatically for his necklace, curling into a fist around the key and twin paws.

"You said you love me, once."

"I still do."

"Then say it again," Rocko demanded.

"I..." Brick tried to continue, but he couldn't. The word caught in his throat, much larger, somehow, than one slim syllable should have been.

Rocko sniffed. "That's what I thought. And I do love you, but I'm tired of waiting around.

"I'm sorry I'm never here. But Hyperion is always up to some shit, and I've gotta be out there, leading these idiots. I gotta-"

"That's not what I meant."

"Oh."

"If you can't, if you don't think you'll ever fall in love with me, I just want to know. I've been wanting to tell you for a long time, and after I met this guy..."

"This guy," Brick repeated bitterly. "Is he bigger'n me? Better looking?"

"No, and no. I don't think so, anyway."

Something boomed outside, like a thunderclap inside a metal drum. There came a whine of damaged rotors, a sound that Brick recognized as the cry of a wounded buzzard, followed by a crunch, then silence. Brick hadn't even heard the buzzard take off. In the ongoing battle against the Hyperion base, Buzzards alighted from the tarmac so often that Brick had begun to tune them out.

Out of the silence rose an unmistakably girlish laugh. She said something, but was too far away for Brick to make it out, and a male voice replied. His tone, gravelly and roguish, lit a smile across Rocko's face. He forced it away, but not before Brick saw.

"Speak of the devil," Rocko said.

"That's him?" Brick asked. Rocko nodded, he slipped out of the hollow behind the stairs. They'd never made it as far as their secret room. Brick wondered if he and Rocko would ever again sneak off down there for an afternoon fuck, or if his hesitation had costed him his last chance. _Fuck it, _he thought as he mounted the stairs, crossing the space to his throne. _Who needs it?_

He sunk into the leather seat, propped an elbow on the salvaged loader arm that served as an armrest, and set his chin in one palm with a careful look of bored indifference. The arena was empty. The royal guards lurked in the shadows, waiting. A few bruisers, some marauders and raiders, and a pack of barely contained psychos. Not the regular Pandora lunatics which had greeted Brick when he'd arrived on the planet five years ago, the sanity bleached out of them by the ruthless desert sun, but the other kind- the soulless vessels that sometimes staggered out of the east.

At first, Brick had turned those mutants away, but as the war with Hyperion claimed more Slabs, they needed anyone they could get. The empties served as canon fodder, expendable meat to be sent first onto the battlefield. Brick could hear them gibbering in their pen below, not talking, exactly, but chortling with something like delight. They sensed the commotion outside, and it stirred them.

One of the Slab officers met Brick's eyes, his hand resting over the throttle that would release the mutants. Brick shook his head.

The girl, barely more than a child, arrived first. She burst through the small entrance (someone had thought to seal the larger hangar) and landed on the ground with the grace of a cat. She sprung up, firing on the castle guards without missing a beat. She strafed along the wall and ducked behind a pylon to spare her rapidly depleting shield.

The man jumped down next. He retrieved some kind of block from his bandoleer and threw it out. A turret clattered and clanked outward, at least twice as large as Roland's had been, and it turned an unfeeling eye on the nearest Slabs. A volley of machine gunfire burst from its barrel, making short work of shields and flesh alike.

"Axton!" Rocko yelled and leaped back through the doorway he'd emerged from. The turret spackled the wall around the door with bullet holes. "Put that thing away!"

"Sorry," Axton said, laughing. He slipped a hand underneath the turret to press something that sent it slithering back into itself, but not before it ripped apart the helpless caged mutants.

"Thank you," Rocko snipped, emerging from cover. "Hey, guess what? The king's in today."

"No shit? Where's he at?"

Brick stood up from his throne. Axton didn't see him rising in the shadows, but the girl did, and, meeting Brick's gaze, tapped her companion on the shoulder. Axton looked up just as Brick leaped down, crouched, then stood up to his full height. He towered over the pair of fighters.

"Whatchu want?"


	2. Days in the Sun

Axton and the girl, who'd introduced herself as Gaige, explained that they'd been sent by the Crimson Raiders. Brick growled at that and nearly skulked off, but Rocko stayed him. They'd infiltrated the Slab Kingdom twice already—And killed more of my men, Brick asked, to which Axton had shrugged and said that if there'd been a doorbell, they would have used it—but Brick had been out on a mission both times.

He'd made the group come upstairs when it became clear that they'd be there for awhile. Brick sat in his throne with the two Raiders standing in front of him. Rocko perched on one of the throne's chunky arms, leaning against Brick's side. "That shit down there, with the turret...an' you, kid, you got brass balls. That was the initiation I ever seen," Brick said.

"Initiation?" Axton asked.

"Into the Slabs," Brick said, grinning.

"Sweet!" Gaige said. "Does that mean I get to fly one of those things?"

"A buzzard? Sure. Be careful, though. They got some hiccups."

"I know. I was thinking I might make a few adjustments first. The tandem rotors are pretty good for anti-tourque, but it leaves a lot of area for, you know, bullets. And with them enclosed like that, the blades get shredded. I was thinking a smaller gauge on the grate-"

"We tried that. Didn't work," Rocko explained.

"Larger, then? So bullets go straight through?"

"Maybe-"

"Hey, Slab King. Is your name Brick?" Axton asked, winding an arm around Gaige's waist. She shot him a look for interrupting her conversation, but returned the gesture, locking arms behind their backs.

Brick frowned. "I go by Slab King, now."

"But you are Brick?"

"Yeah. Why?"

"I thought so. Roland didn't mention your name, but Mordecai talks a lot about some guy named Brick...about you, I guess."

"What's he say?" Brick asked, and tried to conceal the unexpected shiver that thrilled through him.

"Not much that's repeatable. At least, not to a bandit lord. Mama didn't raise a fool," Axton said with a half-cocked grin that made Brick begin to understand what had endeared Rocko to him.

"Spill it."

"Just that you used to be friends, but you skipped out. And a lot of words that I won't repeat. I don't even know what half of them mean."

Brick chuckled. He thought he knew exactly what those words might be. "A'right, lets cut to the chase. Whaddya want from me?"

"Roland said you might be able to help us with something," Axton said.

"Fuck Roland," Brick grunted. "I ain't doin shit for that asshole."

"Would you do it for Lilith?" Gaige asked.

Brick shrugged, slouching back in his seat. "I'unno. Depends on what she wants."

"It's Hyperion. We need your buzzards to blast open the gate to Jack's city, Opportunity, or some shit name like that."

"You had me at Hyperion."

"You'll do it?"

"Sure. Anything for a fellow Slab. Talk to Rocko, he'll handle the details. I heard you've met already," Brick said.

Axton raised a self-conscious hand to his neck. "Yeah. Rocko was very accommodating when I was last here. You've got a good right hand man," he said. He shot a wink to Rocko.

Brick scowled. "Yeah, okay. Maybe you better go over the details with me, instead."

"I just remembered," Gaige said. "We were supposed to tell you something else. It's bad news."

"Yeah?"

"It's...uhm..." The girl kicked one scuffed sneaker against the ground.

"Come on, kid, I ain't got all day."

"Bloodwing's dead."

For Brick, the color rushed out of the world, turning it into a sepia print. A million miles away, the girl was still talking, saying something about a laboratory and Jack's experiments, and that they tried to stop it, they really tried, but Brick wasn't listening.

He was thinking about Mordecai. Mordecai with Bloodwing on his arm, preening and pushing her head against his stubbly cheek. Mordecai recounting how he'd found her as a chick, and she'd bitten him every day for weeks before finally letting him feed her, his voice nauseatingly laden with love. He loved that filthy bird. She was his best friend, better than Brick, even. And now...

Brick shot up from the throne. Axton threw a protective arm across Gaige's chest, which she pushed away with a scoff.

"I'm comin back with you," Brick announced.

"Now?" Rocko asked.

"If they're leavin now, so am I."

"What about the Slabs? We need you. You cant just leave."

"You take over while I'm gone. You do it all the time, anyway, so it'll be just like that."

"But it's not-"

"I'm going, Rocko. This ain't a democracy."

Rocko hopped down off the throne and stalked across the room without a backward glance. He stamped down the stairs, leaving a surprised Brick behind.

"If you guys need to, uh, talk it over, we've got some stuff to do here," Axton said.

"Yeah. Someone named Shooty Mcface wants to see us, and we've gotta take some photos for Scooter. It could be awhile," Gaige added.

Brick was already lumbering after Rocko. He didn't see him when he rounded the corner, but noticed the almost imperceptible dimming in the stairwell when the hidden door snicked shut. He descended the stairs, squeezed underneath, and, with a steeling breath, ducked into their hideaway.

Rocko had thrown off his mask, shirt and jacket and tossed them on the floor in a heap, leaving his torso bare. The rise and fall of his chest betrayed his labored breathing. Brick's eyes roved automatically over that familiar frame, over the soft arcs of his abs and the dark nipples that he'd licked and teased a thousand times, following the tattoos which coiled around his arms and down his sides, disappearing below the hem of his jeans.

It might have been a sexy sight, one that would usually have Brick half across the room and pawing at the man in a heartbeat, except that Rocko's hair was still tousled from yanking the shirt up over his head, and the look on his face...He looked, to Brick, like a tough kid with a broken arm.

"You got here quicker than I expected," Rocko said, his voice thick with emotion. He thumbed the sheen of tears from his eyes and tried to tug his hair back into place. "I was going to give you a reason to stay."

"Whaddya mean? Sex?" Brick asked.

"It was always good enough for you before."

Brick thought the accusation was meant to wound him, but he couldn't be mad. He was wrenched by something else, by guilt, because Rocko looked so vulnerable, so sad and small. "That's not what I want," Brick said.

"I know. You want him."

"No! It ain't about that. Mordecai loved that bird, and he's gonna be a mess without her."

"Sure," Rocko said, sliding down to sit on the mattress.

"I'm gonna come back."

"Do what you want."

The childlike quality that had made Rocko endearing a moment ago now made him seem petulant, as he looked away from Brick and crossed his arms over his chest. Brick scowled.

"What the hell do you want me to say? Anyway, weren't you just tryin to break up with me? I thought you wanted to screw that Dahl guy."

"I was bluffing, okay? I was trying to make you jealous."

"Why?"

"Because I wanted you to know that you give a shit. I want _you._"

"I..." Brick said, the irritation washed out of him. He grappled for something more to say, but the words hung just out of his reach.

"I know. You said it when we first met, in the shower."

"Huh? What'd I say?"

"You said you can't."

Rocko hung his head. Brick crossed the room and perched on the bed beside him. Dark wings of hair hid the younger man's features, and Brick brushed a lock of it back across his ear. Rocko barked a choked laugh.

"'m sorry. I wish..." Brick said.

"It's fine, Brick. I'm fine."

Brick didn't know what to say, so he slouched against the wall and looked wearily around the room. He'd seen it almost every day for years, although less often recently, as the Hyperion corporation tightened their hold on Pandora and Brick was needed in the field. The room, barely larger than a closet, was full of Brick and Rocko's combined scents. It smelled like every sweaty fuck they'd ever shared, every cigarette passed back and forth in the dark. Brick had left his mark on the space by pasting up pages from gun catalogs.

Brick would miss the place. He'd miss Rocko, too, and being with him here. He had to return to Sanctuary, in case Mordecai needed him, but he didn't relish the thought of rejoining civilization, where he couldn't shoot anyone who pissed him off, or slip off to screw his gorgeous boyfriend whenever the mood struck him. He'd be trading his kingdom for a snowy, windswept waste, so close to the Pandora's pole that the sun never rose to its apex, only skipped like a flat stone across the horizon. Just thinking about that impenetrable chill drove him to shudder.

"I want to show you something," Rocko said. He slipped off the mattress, kneeling on the tattered rug that covered the hideaway's floor. He felt blindly for something under the mattress, and Brick scooted to sit on the floor beside him, allowing him access to whatever he was looking for.

"Here," Rocko said, and pulled out a book.

"What is it?"

"Memories." He shifted, sliding closer to Brick with the book on his lap. It was some kind of tattered old album, the pages yellowed by age. Brick could see the corners of photos that hadn't been fixed down stuffed between the pages.

"Memory!" Rocko burst into song, nearly shouting. "All alone in the moonlight! I can smile at the old days-"

"For fuck's sake, Rocko, you scared the shit out of me."

"Sorry," Rocko said, chuckling. He wiped the remnants of tears from his eyes and let the book fall open across his legs.

The page it opened to was thick with pictures, pasted so close together that their edges overlapped. Captions had been scribbled in what little margin remained. Brick recognized Rocko's peculiarly feminine handwriting, his tiny, loopy scrawl nearly impossible to read.

The pictures were of Stone and Ruby, mostly. A snapshot of them on the roof, looking out over the Slab kingdom. One of Stone, shirtless, a line of hair as bushy as his mustache trailing down his chest, throwing up a hand to fend off the photographer- Rocko, presumably. Ruby, barefoot in the morning. Stone playing guitar. The last photo on the page was all three of them, Rocko's hand offscreen, holding the camera. Stone bent over Rocko, lips pressed to the top of his head.

"I thought I could have that again," Rocko admitted. "With you and the girls."

"We did. For awhile."

"There's no going back. I should have known that, but I wanted it so bad. So _fucking_ bad."

Brick's fingers found Rocko's and laced together. "I wanna go back, too."

"You are, right? Going back to Mordecai?"

"That ain't what I meant."

Rocko squeezed his hand. "But you want to. You don't have to feel bad. Listen, if I could go back, and have what you've still got...I'd do it. In a heartbeat."

He paused, smiling dreamily down at the photos. "She used to watch this tape all the time, this musical where everyone's dressed up like cats, and make us act out the scenes. And Stone...After those bastards killed him, it was a year before he stopped being my last thought at before I fell asleep and my first thought in the morning. I would wake up in the middle of the night to his snoring, then realize it couldn't be him, it was just in my head. I'd never hear his stupid nose again. I still can't stop feeling like I could have stopped it, if I'd just been...better. Stronger. Now, I can't even kill the guys who did it. I want to look at them every day. I deserve that much."

"No," Brick said. "Remember what you told me about Kindle? That it ain't my fault? Well, this ain't your fault."

"He used to call me Rocky," Rocko said. He ran his thumb over the photo of Stone by himself, tracing the line of chest hair.

"Rocky and Stone," Brick said.

"And Ruby."

Brick leaned in to kiss Rocko's cheek. He was going to return to the Slab kingdom, he didn't doubt that, but Rocko was right- There was no going back, not really. Kindle's neck would never be miraculously unsnapped. That was an intransmutable grief, one that had changed their ragtag family forever.

Rocko hummed as Brick's lips pressed against his cheek. "You've still got a chance, though. Mordecai is alive."

Brick wished that Rocko would stop talking about Mordecai. It made him uncomfortable, tickling a flame of guilt, but in another breath, a second flame of...Brick wasn't sure. Something like excitement mingled with dread.

"Sorry. I'm not bitter, really," Rocko said, when Brick didn't respond.

"You can be. I wouldn't blame ya. But, you know, that Axton guy is cute."

"I told you, that was just-"

"Come on, I saw how you smiled when you heard his voice." A vestigial possessiveness had crept into Brick's tone, and he squashed it before he continued. "It's fine if you wanna get with him. Looks like he's got a girl, too. Another family."

Rocko waved his hand, swatting away the idea. "I don't think it's that kind of relationship," he scoffed.

"Huh?"

"He didn't tell me before, but...you saw them, right? The way they wrapped their arms around each other. Like we do."

"Ah, yeah," Brick said, remembering it now. "Oh well. There'll be other guys. Cuter ones. And I ain't gonna keep you from them."

"Thanks, babe. Er, Brick," Rocko amended. "Mm...no. Babe."

The twin fires in Brick's belly fluttered, that shame and excitement, and fed a terrible urge. "Uh...do you still wanna...you know?"

Rocko laughed. "I do."

So they did, more gently than they'd ever done before, kissing the whole while and coming to shallow completion in each other's arms. They dressed wordlessly afterward. Brick didn't notice the scrapbook resting on his jeans. When he yanked them up, it flipped the book onto the floor. Loose photos fluttered out from between the pages.

"Shit, sorry," Brick said, gathering them up. His eyes fell on one photo and stuck there. He lifted the picture with trembling fingers that felt too slow, raising it to look at it closer.

"What's that?" Rocko asked, peering over Brick's shoulder. "Oh, God, _that_ one. Look at my hair! I was twenty, twenty-one? Just out of school, first day with Dahl. I was stationed there in Lynchwood for awhile, until-" he continued, but Brick had stopped listening.

The photo showed a group of six young men and women, new Dahl recruits, all smiling for the picture. Brick could easily tell which one was Rocko—his hair even longer than usual, down to his shoulders and, yes, falling into his face—but that wasn't what had drawn Brick's interest. It was the girl, one half of a couple. A grinning man had his arm wrapped around her, and her head rested on his shoulder. Her dark tumble of hair spilled over his arm.

The woman was achingly familiar. Brick's own lips smiled out from her face, and it was his daddy's eyes that seemed to stare into his.

"Do you remember her?" Brick demanded, poking a unsteady finger into the photo, hard enough to leave a bend. "This girl?"

Rocko squinted. "Uh...Sort of. I think those two were married. They were cute, but I didn't know them very well. He was a miner, and I think...maybe she was, too? I can't remember. Why?"

"That's my sister," Brick said. If he had any doubt, if her lips and eyes and mass of curly hair weren't enough for him to be sure, those doubts would be extinguished by the key that hung from a chain around her neck.


	3. Tower

Brick sat in the gunner turret of Axton's truck, hunched over controls he wasn't allowed to use. Of course, he _had _used them; the first thing he did after they left Thousand Cuts was fire a rocket into their vehicle's path, scaring the hell out of Gaige. _You're lucky she didn't have Deathtrap out,_ Axton chuckled when Gaige demolished Brick's shield with a furious burst from her SMG.

After that, Brick behaved himself. He wished he'd taken a buzzard, though, and gone on ahead, so he could have some time alone with his old friend—he half hoped for a repeat of their last reunion—but it was too late now.

"Hey. Hey! Slab King," Axton said, and snapped his fingers.

"What?"

"Wanna play a game?"

"Uh...sure."

Brick hoped it wasn't I-Spy. They passed through mile after mile of snowy wasteland, barren but for the bones of a few knobby trees. In places, jagged outcroppings of stone broke through the ice crust, but they were as gray and dim as the rest of the landscape. The only good subject for I-Spy might have been the storm clouds that clustered on the horizon. I spy something dense and dark purple. I spy something full of sick, strobing yellow light. But that would be it, and then they'd be left with the snow: I spy something whitish-gray. I spy something cold.

"Marry, boff, kill...Moxxi, Marcus, Mister Torgue," Axton said. "And you have to tell us why."

Brick hated to ask, but... "Boff?"

"You know," Gaige said. She took both hands off the wheel so she could gesture—a finger thrust repeatedly through a loosely curled fist—and snatched the wheel again before they veered into some rocks. "Boff."

"Why the hell did I let you drive?" Axton grumbled under his breath.

"Huh. I guess I'd marry Torgue, and-"

"Ugh! Torgue?" Gaige cried.

"Yeah, so what?" Brick asked.

"He's always yelling. It would be, like, HEY, BABY, WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR DINNER TONIGHT? DARLING, SHOULD WE VISIT YOUR PARENTS OR MINE FOR MERCENARY'S DAY THIS YEAR?"

Axton snickered behind his hand, and Brick had to concede to her point. "Fine. I'd marry Marcus."

"Yuck, why?" Gaige asked. "You should marry Moxxi."

"Then I'll marry Moxxi."

"You can't just go along with what I say. You've got to pick who you want. Okay, well, who would you boff?"

"Torgue," Brick said easily.

Gaige yelled, making Axton jump: "OH, YEAH, THAT'S THE SPOT! THAT FEELS GOOOOD! I WANT YOU TO PUT YOUR EXPLODING GUN IN MY-"

"We're here!" Axton announced, loud enough to drown out the rest of Gaige's sentence.

Distracted, Brick hadn't noticed the tower looming over the horizon, but now its shadow fell over them. Even Gaige was silent as they rolled up to its base, staring up at the monolith. It was a perfect home for the Mordecai: a place to perch and snipe from, where Bloodwing could have easy access to the skies.

But Bloodwing was dead. Brick had almost forgotten that, but now he remembered it with a sense of unreality almost as intense as when he'd first found out.

"You want to head up first? Me and Gaige have something we've got to take care of," Axton said.

"Huh?" Gaige asked.

"Remember, the thing?"

Gaige stared at him for moment longer. "Oh! Yeah, the thing. We'll catch up with you, Brick."

"O-kay," Brick said. He vaulted over the side of the truck. Snow crunched under his boots, a satisfying sound that he'd missed, as he ambled up to the tower's single entrance. When he reached the door, he glanced back at the truck. The pair were making out, Gaige pulled into Axton's lap, his hands shamelessly cupping her butt.

Brick chuckled and tried the door handle. It was unlocked, and it swung inward easily, his gentle shove amplified by a sudden gust of wind. The door banged against the wall. The metallic boom reverberated though the tower, reminding Brick of his old cellblock.

"Mordy?" he called. That echoed, too, but nobody called down. Brick mounted the stairs. They curved up around the inside of the tower, like those in a lighthouse, with a metal rail between Brick and the drop. While he climbed, he thought about what he might say to Mordecai. Every possibility seemed ridiculous.

_Hey, amigo, remember me? Yeah, sorry I never called. Bad ECHO reception out there in the Cuts. Hey, could you come with me to Lynchwood? Because I think my sister might be there, and I'm scared shitless to go alone. Oh, and also, wanna fuck?_

Brick reached the top of the stairs and emerged into a single room, one which he would have recognized as Mordecai's even if he hadn't known. Everywhere he looked were booze bottles, gun parts, and unwashed clothes. Bloodwing was gone, but the floor was still spattered with bird shit, thick as guano in a cave. The place stank to hell.

Mordecai stood at the far end of the room, staring out of a huge open window. He looked like a swaddled skeleton, painfully thin against the bruised, storm-bearing sky. A bottle hung loosely in his grip.

"Mordy...?" Brick repeated.

Mordecai turned to look at him. Brick noticed how sunken his cheeks looked, how unkempt and greasy his beard had become. It seemed as though he'd stopped maintaining his dreads. A halo of friz marked his hairline.

"Fuck off," Mordecai snarled.

Brick frowned. "I missed you."

Mordecai laughed, a humorless rattle. "Fuck you. Fuck you, you lying _Puta_. I don't want you here."

"But-" Brick was cut off when Mordecia hurled the bottle. It smashed against the wall behind Brick, sending shards of glass tinkling down the stairs. Mordecai lurched forward with drunken, staggering steps.

"_Te odio_! _Pudrete en el infierno_. Go back to your _kingdom._ Go fuck your precious queen, I can't care. Just stay away from me."

Brick wanted to take a step back, but he stood on the cusp of the stairs. "I heard about Blood."

"An' you thought, what? That I'd need you? You're a fucking unbelievable prick."

"Come on, Mordy-"

Mordecai reached Brick and caught him off-guard with a open palmed slap. The blow glanced off his energy shield, leaving a shivering wake. "If you think you can just come back, after all this time-"

"I'm tryin' to apologize for that!"

"_Cierra la boca!_ There's nothing you can say. Idiot. Bastard!" Mordecai spat, and hit Brick again, twice, three times. Brick caught his arm and forced him away, drove him a step back. A string of drool hung from his lip.

"She's gone, my best friend's gone, and I'm stuck with you."

Brick wilted. "I know. I shoulda been here, helping to look after her."

"You wouldn't have done _shit_,"Mordecai said. With the hand not gripped by Brick, he snared his fingers around the charms on that larger man's necklace. He held the sloppy fistful up to Brick's face. "You couldn't help them, could you?"

Brick shoved him away. Mordecai staggered back a few steps, nearly stumbling over a heap of clothes. His eyed fixed on the ground, he reached up to wipe away the drool glistening from his beard. He turned away.

"I gotta pack. They're making me come back to Sanctuary," he said.

Brick remained at the top of the stairs. He animal throbbed in his throat, hot and awful. He felt fixed to the spot.

Mordecai staggered around the room, gathering an armful of sour smelling clothes. "Make yourself useful, if you wont leave. Help me pick this shit up."

Brick obeyed numbly.

They packed in silence while the storm mounted outside. The clouds roiled upward, giving Brick the impression of a nearly remembered nightmare, and lightning growled and snapped in their purple bellies.

"Why do you hafta go back to Sanctuary? Raider stuff?" Brick asked eventually.

"Nah. Lil doesn't trust me here."

"Why?"

Mordecai paused, his back still turned to Brick, and gave a slight shrug. "Window's too big."

He resumed slinging his belongings into a bag, leaving Brick to mull over the statement.

"She...thinks you're gonna jump? That's nuts!" Brick said.

"Is it?"

Brick didn't answer. He grabbed Mordecai instead, spun him around and flung his arms around him so fast that his energy shield activated, triggered by the sudden movement. Mordecai was gently bumped away. To Brick's relief, his dour lips twitched up into the faintest ghost of a smile.

"Tickles," Mordecai said, clutching his chest where Brick's shield had zapped him.

Brick tried the hug again, this time slow enough to bypass the shield. He sobbed a laugh against the top of Mordecai's head.

"I still hate you," Mordecai said. Brick only sniffled. "Are you crying into my fucking hair? Because I _will_ shoot you. Don't think your goddamned shield is good enough to-"

"Guys? You ready to go? The storm is picking up out there," called Axton's voice from downstairs.

"Yeah, we're coming," Mordecai answered. He tried to pry Brick off him, but the stronger man held him tight. "Brick, c'mon."

"Don't. Please, don't..." Brick said, voice cracking.

"I'm not gonna do nothing. I was just pissed off, okay? I'm coming with you to Sanctuary. Maybe they'll even let you back in the Raiders, if you lick Roland's ass enough."

Brick released the smaller man with a dismissive scoff.

"Come on. They're waiting for us," Mordedai said, hitched the bag over his shoulder, and started down the stairs.


	4. Stripped

Brick lifted the girl and spun her around, making her laugh and grip his forearms. She was heavier now, older than the last time he saw her. That had been a year ago, when she'd attacked the same Hyperion facility as Brick and his Slabs—a coincidence—and had made a holy wreck of it. He'd carried her on his shoulders while she'd lobbed grenades, both whooping like madmen. It had been, as she'd put it...the bomb.

"You lookin' FOINE, Big! Married life suits you."

"You ain't changed at all," he said, setting her back on her toes.

"You kidding? I've changed lots. Checkitout checkitout checkitout. Check, check, check—drop the beat—Oontz. Check it," Tina waited for him to check it out, although he had no idea what 'it' was.

"I don't see nothin," Brick confessed.

"I got boobs!"

"Oh, goddamnit, Teeny."

"They perf, right? I named them. Wanna know what I named them?" she asked, following Brick back to the truck.

"Nope."

"Hanz and Franz. Remember those guys? You told me how you punched those doofuses right in the giant pecs, so I thought, y'know, that would be a good name for my girls."

"Please, stop," Brick begged, giving her a boost into the truck.

"Oomph," she wheezed as she wedged between Gaige and Mordecai.

Axton shoved Gaige, who in turn jabbed an accidental elbow into Gaige. "This is ridiculous," he said. "This thing has two seats, driver and gunner. It's not built for this many people."

"Got ya covered, gurl," Tina said. She scrambled up the back of the seat, kicking Gaige in the ear as she passed, and plopped herself in Brick's lap. When she was situated, she poked Axton in the back of the head. "Drive on, drive on."

"Why are you coming, again?" he asked.

The truck rolled forward, hydroplaning briefly on the ice.

"Since Mordy doesn't need a babysitter no more, I figured I'd see if Moxxi is ready for that date. Now that I got these puppies." She groped her own chest, and Brick slapped her hand away.

"Knock it off," he said.

Axton cleared his throat. "So, Brick. You're married?"

"Nope."

"_Practically_ married," Tina said.

"Sorry, Teeny. Me and Rocko split up."

"That..." Tina said, paused. "That sucks." Brick waited for the rest, whatever joke or limerick the girl had chambered, but it never came. His admission seemed to have struck her hard.

"This might be inappropriate, but does that mean you wouldn't mind if someone asked Rocko out? Me, for example?" Axton asked. Gaige swatted him.

"I'm _right_ here."

"Just kidding, darl- little lady," Axton said, wrapping one arm around Gaige's shoulders. She humphed and halfheartedly tried to shrug him off.

Brick was looking at Mordecai, trying to gauge his reaction to what he'd said about Rocko. It was stupid. He _knew_ it was stupid, but the second he saw Mordecai standing with his back turned, silhouetted against the storm (which still threatened with flashes of barely concealed lightning) and telling him to fuck off, Brick had found that bird, again: the one which settled on the day Mordecai shot him. He'd thought it had flown away, but it had only been hibernating until the sight of Mordecai's skinny ass and sloppy dreads brought it back around.

If Mordecai had any feelings about Brick's breakup with Rocko, he hid them. His arm flopped over the side of the truck, his goggled gaze fixed on the horizon.

"Rocko can do whatever he wants," Brick said at last.

"Hey, hey, pull over," Tina said, leaning over the truck's turret to shake Axton's shoulder. "I gotta make a stop."

"You gotta piss?" Brick asked.

Tina sniffed. "A lady does not piss. She tinkles."

"Whatever," Brick said, as Axton obediently pulled the truck to a halt along the shoulder of the road. "Do you gotta tinkle?"

"Nah, somethin' else." She dismounted the vehicle. When her feet touched the ice, she slipped and nearly smacked her head on the bumper, but caught herself. She slid downhill a ways, crunching quickly across the snow when it became deeper. Ahead of her was an encampment, half hidden behind a ramshackle fence.

"You comin?" she called back.

Brick sighed and swung out of the truck. "What're we doing?" he asked as he caught up to her.

"We? Nothing. You're just here to distract these guys," she said.

"Huh?" Brick said. He looked around to see who she meant. Through the gap in the fence, Brick saw them; A semi-circle of parka clad figures huddled around a small pit of smoldering coals. They glanced up at the intruders. When they raised their arms to point, and Brick noticed the weapons slung across their backs and strapped to their hips- brushed and burnished steel, mostly Vladof assault rifles.

"Who're you?" One of them asked, rising to his feet. "You don't belong here!"

When Brick turned back to Tina, she'd disappeared.

"The Pandoran orphan slips away from predators. Her pasty albino ass affords her camouflage in the snow," Gaige remarked.

The other nomads followed the first, standing up and drawing their guns. "I'm talking to _you_," said the leader, taller than the rest by almost half. He jabbed an accusatory finger toward them as he spoke.

"Us?" Brick asked dumbly. His fingers itched for his own revolver, but he left it holstered.

"I don't see any other bandit shitbirds around here, so I must mean you."

"We're not bandits," Brick said automatically, although it was mostly a lie.

"Oh, shaddup," the leader said, striding up to him. He came to a stop a few feet away, his rifle raised and poking Brick in the chest. "You look like a damn Bloodshot. I hate those guys, always hitting our marks after we called dibs."

"I told you, we ain't no Bloodshots. We're..."

Brick was about to say Raiders, but that would be a mistake. Bandits had no love for the Raiders. Suddenly, Brick saw Tina. She'd ducked into the camp, but her colorless tuft of hair and dark-lined eyes peered out from behind the fence. She spotted Brick looking at her and held a finger to her lips.

"We're entertainers," Axton said.

"Yeah? Like singers?" the nomad asked.

Tina mouthed something that Brick squinted to make it out. "Strippers?"

"_Que la chinga!_" Mordecai hissed. "Why?"

"I..." Brick tried to accuse Tina, but she'd vanished again. "...I donno."

"No, no, no. No way," said Axton.

The tall nomad reached up, flipped the hood back, and shook a thick, blond mane away from a distinctly feminine face. Her height, which had seemed imposingly masculine a moment ago, now gave her the look of an Amazon. Although Brick had no interest in women that way, he couldn't help but notice that she was gorgeous. Strong features, dazzling blue eyes, and full, sensual lips that curled into a wry a smile.

"Strippers, huh?"

"Oh, yes," Axton said. "Yes, we are. I could give you a private show..."

"I'm _still_ right here," Gaige said, throwing up her arms in defeat.

The nomad leader scoffed. "Not from you," she said. With her voice no longer muffled by the hood, Brick could hear that she spoke with a thick Russian accent. She turned her attention to Gaige. "But, maybe from her?"

"Oh," said Gaige, her face turning the same scarlet as her hair. "Oh, I...Sure."

"What?" Axton squawked. "You can't!"

"Why not? You were going to."

"You...you don't have any music."

Gaige punched a command into her digistruct wristband. The amazonian nomad waited with a bemused smile, and soon a song began to play from Gaige's ECHO. _Pour some sugar on me, in the name of love!_

"You can't be serious," Axton said.

Gaige looked straight at him while she pinched the glove on her real hand with between her robotic thumb and forefinger, and, with deliberate slowness, tugged it off.

"You are being so immature right now."

Gaige laughed and unzipped her hoody, swaying with the music, then let it slough off and fall to the ground. Her eyes remained fixed on Axton's. "If I'm so immature, how come you're the one who's pouting?"

"Okay, that's enough. It's cold. I don't want you to get sick," Axton said.

But Gaige was already pulling her shirt up, struggling to strip while still moving to the beat. The hem caught on her messy pigtails, but it came over her head with a hard yank, leaving her to shiver in just a bra.

"Nice," said the Nomad leader, who had been silently appreciative of the show in spite of Gaige and Axton's bickering. "Okay, you'll do."

"Do what?" Gaige asked. She hopped on one foot, paused in the act of taking off one of her sneakers.

"For the harem."

"Oh, no," Gaige said. "No thanks."

"I wasn't asking," the woman said, giving her hair another casual flip. "Get 'em, boys."

The half circle of nomads tightened as they took a step forward, and the clatter of guns being slung forward and cocked filled the air. Axton sidled in front of Gaige to shield her with his body, although the energy shield on her hip still blinked at full charge. She reached for her digistruct module.

"Don't move! We'll shoot," The leader warned, but it was too late. Gaige had already punched in a command.

The hologram etched something into existence. It wasn't a gun, as Brick has expected, but something much larger. Something that announced its arrival with a grinding cry and shielded all four of them with its bulk.

As promised, the bandits opened fire, but the bullets snapped off the machine's energy shield. The thing—a robot, Brick guessed—raised its massive metal arm. A beam shot from its palm. The bandits who were caught in its blue light screamed. Their shields popped instantly, their skin blistered.

"Okay, so, we gotta go!" It was Tina, back from her mysterious errand. "Go go go go go!"

She grabbed Brick's hand in one of hers and Mordecai's in the other, trying to tug them along in the direction of the car. The two men looked at each other, shrugged, and mounted the hill with her. Brick heard Axton and Gaige bringing up the rear. The nomads' screaming stopped just as Brick hauled himself into the gunner seat, and he looked out just in time to see the robot digistructed away.

Axton swung into the driver's seat.

"Drive!" Tina crowed, and slapped him on the shoulder.

He hit the gas and pulled away from the camp with a screech of tires and a sidewinding slide. They gained some traction, picked up speed, and bumped over an embankment. The tires left the road, giving them an exhilarating burst of airtime before the truck set back down. Axton pumped the gas, and they practically flew across the expanse of bright, glittering snow.

Brick frowned. "Why'd we have to-"

An explosion erupted behind them. Brick twisted around, nearly knocking Tina out of his lap, and saw the bandit camp in flames. The first blast triggered a second, smaller one, which in turn set off the largest explosion yet, so bright and hot that Brick had to look away.

Axton whistled. "That's what we stopped for?"

"Yep."

"Why?"

"Bitch called me fat."

"Oh," Axton said, scratching his stubbly jaw. "I called my ex-wife fat, once. I think I would have preferred explosions to the hell she put me through. She ripped me up one side and down the other for that one."

Mordecai chuckled. "That's what you're signing up for when you get married. Wives, they pick away at you. That's what I always liked about Brick. He-" he paused, seeming to realize the implication of his words, but, finding no way back, shrugged. "He's easygoing."

"T-told you he t-t-talks about you a lot," Gaige said. She hugged her naked, goosepimpled arms. Mordecai scowled, but struggled out of his ridiculously overlong scarf and shoved it into Gaige's lap. She gave him a grateful grin before wrapping it around her body. "Th-thanks."

Tina breathed a tiny sigh of contentment and snuggled back against Brick's chest. Her hair smelled like gunpowder and sulfur, which he found strangely comforting. He dozed, only grunting in agreement or giving one word answers when anyone spoke to him. Before long, the truck's gentle rocking ceased.

Brick opened his eyes to look around. Moonlight reflected on the snow, lighting the area well enough for him to see that they hadn't reached Sanctuary. Instead, they'd pulled up to an unmanned outpost, just a tin roof that spanned over a digistruct garage and one of those abominable Fast-travel stations. He groaned.

"Oh, c'mon, no. Those things always make me vomit. Let's just drive to Sanctuary, it can't be too far."

"You'd be wrong about that," Axton said, mysteriously. "I forgot to tell you."

"Tell me what?"

"You'll see."

Brick didn't like the sound of that, but didn't have much of a choice. "Fine. Lemme get out of the truck, first. Last time I used one of these things, I was sittin down, and it pitched me on my ass when I got there."

He climbed over the side of the vehicle and landed in the snow with a faint crunch. He eyed the horizon and saw a thin strip of light through the clouds. For a moment, he thought that dawn was approaching, then remembered that the sun never sunk too far below the skyline out here. It would be just behind those snowy screes.

"Ready?" Axton said, after he'd punched a code into the console.

The others responded—yeah, yep, ready—but Brick only shrugged. He knew what to expect and wasn't looking forward to it. The prickle of his molecules loosening, the helplessness of being torn apart, transported, and put back together somewhere else, hopefully unchanged. The horrifying idea of his soul waiting in limbo. And, of course, the nausea that would follow.

But Brick didn't know that something worse waited, a hunting thing, a hungry thing. A thing which waited for Brick's body to shatter, poised to drag his mind into Hell.


	5. Hell

Brick slouched at the kitchen table with Priscilla snoring by his feet. The kitchen was warm, always too warm, fed by the behemoth of a stove that heated the whole house. The radio crackled, and Brick turned the knob, a little one way, then the other, trying to bring the garbled station into focus. The static parted just as a choir of women answered a man's croon. _Wake up, Jacob,_ _d__ay is a'breakin. _In Brick's dozy mind, they sounded like angels.

He rested a flushed cheek against the table. The grain of wood was cool against his skin.

"What're you doing, baby?"

Brick's head snapped up. He hadn't heard the screen door's creak over the radio, and now his momma stood in the doorway, a burlap sack slung over one shoulder.

"Nothin."

"Taking a nap?"

"Yeah. I guess. Sorry."

She waved off his apology and crossed the kitchen to the stretch of countertop. When she laid down the burlap sack, a green apple tumbled loose from its folds. Brick propped his chin in one hand.

"Did you collect the eggs this morning?" his momma asked. She'd withdrawn a knife from the drawer. She held it in one hand and turned the apple against the blade with the other, carving skin from flesh in one long coil.

"Yeah, momma."

"And you fed the chickens?"

"Yup."

She made a noise, a humph of acknowledgment, and held up the apple peel without turning around. "Want this?"

Brick nodded. His momma waited for a moment before facing him, one brow raised.

"You fall asleep again?"

"Oh, sorry. I nodded."

His momma snorted and walked the peel across the room to him, then returned to the rest of the apples. The outside of the peel was glossy green, the inside scant and mealy. The skin remembered the shape of the apple, and it curled around Brick's fingers while be nibbled it.

"What about the cucumbers? Did you get to the weeds like I asked?" his momma asked as she began to chop the peeled apples, holding the knife with one hand and crushing it down with a flat palm.

Brick hesitated. He hadn't weeded the cucumbers. Not because he forgot, but because the patch was out by the cellar, its rotted door in clear view from the garden's tidy rows. Since his momma hid Emmett's body down there, Brick had not so much as strayed around that side of the house. Winter had buried the cellar door in snow, spring and summer had thawed it bare, and Brick hadn't seen it once.

His momma sighed. "It's fine. I'll do it myself once I get this pie in the oven."

He could scarcely believe it. At fifteen, he was plenty old enough to have taken over his daddy's morning chores, surely old enough to face the superstitious sight of that cellar door. His momma could have forced him to look into the cellar's evil eye—the keyhole in its iron latch—but for reasons he couldn't fathom, she'd given him a pass. Maybe the angels on the radio had softened her.

Brick chewed the peel, which already was beginning to brown around the edges, and rested his feet on his dog's warm side. The kitchen was silent except for the steady _thop-thop-thop _of his momma dicing apples.

"I love you, Momma," Brick said. The words slipped from his mouth unexpectedly, like water through his fingers, and just as impossible to recall. He hadn't said those words in forever, years and years. He couldn't remember the last time.

The sound of chopping stopped. Time seemed to stand still. After a long while, his momma fussed with something on the counter, and Brick leaned over to look. She'd lifted the flap of the burlap bag and was peering inside.

"That old bastard cheated me," she said, more resigned than angry. "Half of these are pears."

* * *

><p>Brick thrashed through a cold, wet darkness. He couldn't breathe. When his feet found a silty surface, he braced against it and kicked off. He burst through the surface.<p>

He found himself standing up to his waist in murky water, brown and slimy, more like oil than water. It tasted briny, running from his scalp into his mouth. Bloated human figures floated face-down on the water. Their bodies were as pale and corpulent as the moon above, which peered down at Brick through shifting pillars of smoke.

It was by firelight that Brick saw the scene around him: the nude figures, contorting just as they had in the Garden, but now in agony rather than ecstasy. They bent double to pray, groveling to an unseen God. They cowered from the light of flames which Brick couldn't see. Their glow emanated from old buildings, barely contained by the dark, crumbling shells. Their light cast the rest of the world into deeper shadow.

Brick waded toward the shore. An army of men with tusks and horns crossed a bridge nearby, brandishing spears before them—hut, ho! They cried as they went—but Brick paid them no mind. He focused on slogging carefully, so not to trip over bloated corpses.

In the darkness, it was impossible to see what waited for him on the shore. The glimmer of silver caught his eye. His fingers fluttered to his necklace. Although he was otherwise nude, the chain still hung around his neck, holding the key and the smaller paw, but the other paw was missing.

_You still need to harvest it,_ said a voice. The moon's voice.

Brick shook his head. He remembered removing Pris's paw. Remembered the thunk of the ax, the finality of that sound. The way his momma had shrunk away from him when he returned through the kitchen, covered in blood, with the severed paw clenched in his hand. Remembered that look in her eyes that he'd never seen before, and would only see one more time.

_Go see,_ the moon answered, a shrug in its voice.

Brick did see, suddenly. The slope of land had been shapeless, shadow heaped on shadow, but now he recognized the glimmer for what it was. Barbed wire.

He staggered forward, faster now, heedless of the bodies in his path. They were soft, anyway, half dissolved by the brackish water, and they came apart at the seams when Brick plowed into them, releasing swarms of gnats that obscured his vision.

If he could only get there faster, this time. If he could only...

The bodies packed the water more thickly toward the shore. Their saggy, sallow limbs intertwined, forming a blockade. Brick pushed on, but his progress was slower, slower, until he stumbled. The pale bodies and dark water loomed up to meet him, and he plowed through, splashing into that briny blackness.

* * *

><p>A boy laughed, a sneer in his voice. "Get out of here, mutt. This don't concern you."<p>

Brick looked down at Priscilla. She snarled, hackles raised, but remained obediently by his side. The boy hadn't been talking to her. He'd been looking at Amanda.

"Neanderthal," she said, quipping the insult casually. "And it _is_ my business, if you're messin' with my brother."

Brick, a decade older than his little sister, burned with embarrassment. He tried to take her hand, but she waved him off. "Amanda-"

"Just a damn second. I'm talking."

"Don't bother. They're assholes, okay? Not worth it," he said.

"Who're you calling an asshole?" said the boy. He stood up straighter and puffed out his chest. He was older than Brick, barely a boy at all, but puberty had equaled their heights. At sixteen years old, Brick was just a little taller. But, while Brick had only a little sister who refused to hold his hand, and a dog who barely came up to his knees, the other boy was backed by a group of other gangling bullies.

"You got shit in your ears? He's talking about you!" Amanda said.

The boy slapped her. The other sniggering bullies fell silent in the wake of that sudden, hard smack, and backed away when Brick stepped forward. The boy who'd struck the blow backed away, too, but he was closest, and didn't retreat in time.

Brick snatched him by the collar. Priscilla lunged at the other boys, barking, and they pinwheeled around, shoving each other as they fled.

Brick's animal laughed with his mouth. The boy in his white-knuckled grip flinched, his face pinched in an almost comical expression of terror. The last thing Brick saw before his animal throbbed past him was his own fist connecting with the bully's nose, and the beautiful crack as it snapped.

* * *

><p>"Doesn't it look like the light from the painting? The heaven light?" Amanda asked later, while they were walking home. She pointed to a dark copse of trees.<p>

The sun dipped below their shaggy silhouettes, and its dying light fell through the branches, painting smeary, white-gold streamers in the air. It really did look like heaven, but Brick had no idea what Amanda was talking about.

"What painting?"

"You know, the one in the kitchen. The part with Hell. In the back, you can see these mountains, and there's light shining around them."

"That ain't Heaven. That's just fire."

"No," Amanda insisted. "Some of it's fire, but the part with the mountains...that's heaven. You can tell. It looks different."

Brick knew better than to keep arguing with her. They walked in silence down the dirt road for awhile, listening to bugs settle and frogs sing in the fields on either side of them. Amanda held his hand, now, her small fingers tucked neatly into his huge, bloody ones. Priscilla limped at his heels. Something rustled the grass by the trees, and her ears perked. She bumbled after the noise.

"Pris, stay," Brick commanded, but she ignored him. He let her go. She'd come running home when his daddy called.

"I don't care if they call me a mutt. Mutts are the best dogs," Amanda said, watching the bully-mix amble out of sight. "They live the longest."

* * *

><p>Brick exploded out of the water. It was no longer shallow, but unknowably deep, and he dog-paddled to keep his head above the surface. The icy water sent tendrils of numbness creeping through his limbs. From somewhere came the chanting of monks. They droned in a language that Brick didn't understand, accompanied by the hiss of cymbals and occasional boom of a gong.<p>

He had miraculously surfaced in a ring of unfrozen lake, but all around him was the glitter of ice. His limbs felt sluggish, heavy. Their weight would pull him under soon.

He swam toward a wooden boat which was mired in glacier. An ivory pillar grew out of the boat's basin. It was cracked, so widely at the base that it formed a cavern's mouth, and it was that hole which Brick set his sights on. Brittle ice snapped against his chest and arms. He vaulted over the side of the boat with all his remaining strength and floundered into the pillart's rank interior.

The space was dark and had a sour, beefy smell, like a rotting tooth. Brick thought that might be close to the truth. While the outside of the pillar had been as smooth and white as a bone, the inside was a scabby burgundy, and had a spongy marrow texture.

_Did you drop something?_

Even in this horrible hollow, the moon had found him. Brick reached to his necklace again and discovered that the key was gone.

Brick emerged from the cave. He looked up, his gaze drawn instantly to the key. It dangled from a hook which thrust from the skull of some kind of huge animal. The skull was skewered on a pike, high above the water.

_ What are you waiting for, boy? _The moon prompted. _Climb up there._

Brick sidled up the misshapen pillar, scaling it like a tree, but the branches gave way to a smooth expanse of egglike shell. Reaching as far as he could, he barely managed to grab a jagged edge. He swung out on the handhold and braced his feet against the surface.

Something peered over the shell's curve. An enormous face, bulbous and white, smiling a knowing smile.

"Slip," it whispered.

Startled, Brick lost his hold. He fell into the lake, crashed through the thin layer of ice, and sunk, down and down, into the depths.

* * *

><p>Brick's hand froze on the handle. Through the screen door, he could barely see his daddy pacing out in the field, but heard him still calling for Priscilla.<p>

"That stopped you, didn't it?" his momma cackled from behind him. It was her voice, full of the dryness that sharpened her insults and wrought her jokes with dark wit, but it wasn't her, exactly. Brick could hear her own animal—_her devil_—just below the surface.

"Momma, please," he begged.

"I said no. And I got a right mind to call your daddy in, too, if you keep pestering."

"But she should have come home by now," Brick pressed, his grip tightening on the handle he was too afraid to turn. "I think something happened. I should look for her-"

"No. You're staying here. And if you ask again, I'm going to twist your ear and drag you down to the cellar, just like I used to go when you were a pup. You hear me?"

There was the threat, again. The one which stayed Brick's hand when he tried to leave before. As a young child, being trapped in that sour guts smelling cellar had been the worst thing he could imagine, but he'd been wrong.

Now the cellar contained something much worse than darkness and stench and the imagined wickering of the bird king. Now it was a tomb.

"Back away from the door," his momma ordered.

He obeyed.

"Go to your room. Your daddy will find your damn dog."

Brick turned, his gaze fixed on the floor. He didn't meet his momma's eyes as he crossed the kitchen. When he started up the stairs, he nearly tripped over Amanda. She'd been huddled on the steps, and she stared up at Brick with wide, dark eyes, full of urgent emotion. Her cheek was red where the bully slapped her earlier.

Brick looked away and pushed past her.

* * *

><p>When Brick woke back in Hell, he'd washed up on the shore. He doubled over to puke up a glut of brackish water. As he stood up, he wiped his slick chin with the back of a hand.<p>

Screams filled the air. There was confusion and absurdity all around him, so much that he couldn't take it all in. He caught a glimpse of people crucified on the strings of giant musical instruments, a woman sobbing over the corpse of a fish that she carried in her arms like a child, and, in the distance, the most awful thing, the thing that had haunted his nightmares all his life...the bird king.

This time, Brick didn't wait for the moon to taunt him. He felt that his entire necklace was gone.

He guessed where it would be. Before, his eyes had glossed over the bird king perched on its brassy throne, but now he forced himself to look. His heart sank.

A line of people stood before the king, although they didn't all stand- some knelt, some lay prone on the ground, all sobbing or wailing, while flocks of black birds burst from their orifices. Only one figure was silent.

Mordecai stood closest to the bird king, his back turned to Brick. His wiry frame and dark skin stood out against the pale, writhing bodies around him, and Brick noticed the gleam of the silver chain around his neck.

_When he thought you died, he wore it every night_, the moon said. _He used to wear it and cry..._

Brick had already bolted, running hard for the throne. The bird king was methodically cramming another body down its throat. The man's legs still kicked, and crows exploded from his anus, until the bird king jammed him deeper into its throat and snapped its beak shut, stemming the tide of smaller birds.

_What would you do to save him?_

"Mordy!" Brick yelled, as the bird king reached down with one giant, spindly blue hand, and closed its fingers around the gaunt man.

Brick was too far away. The bird king stretched its beak wide, and-

* * *

><p>Birds chattered in the trees. Their songs were fine and silver, nothing like the guttural wickering of their king. Brick barely heard them. His pulse thundered in his ears, his bare feet hammered the ground and slipped in the dewy grass.<p>

"Pris!" he screamed. "Pris!"

His throat burned from screaming her name. He'd been out since dawn, when the sun barely cast enough watery blue light to see by, and nearly an hour had passed since then.

Bickering crows caught his attention. He spotted them on a hill nearby, a whole flock milling around something he couldn't see. He started up the slope with dreamy slowness. The crows' cackling jangled his nerves.

Through the thickness of oily black feathers, Brick caught glimpse of white fur.

"Pris," he screamed.

He lurched forward. The birds parted, revealing Pris's prone body, but they didn't take flight. Instead, they scolded Brick from a distance.

He fell by his dog's side. At first, he thought she was dead. How could she not be? Someone had stripped the wire from the fence and wrapped it around her, front and back legs, body and muzzle. They'd trussed her like a bird. Blood pinkened her fur around the wire points.

By inches, the crows hopped closer. The hungry gape of their beaks filled Brick with rage. He scooped up a stone and hurled it at the nearest crow, sent it flapping away.

"Get the fuck out of here!" he sobbed. "Pris..."

The dog's eyes opened, and a low whine escaped her throat. The sound wrenched another sob from Brick. He pulled her face onto his lap and worked to unbind her, struggling with the wire, mindless of the way the barbs dug into his palms. It was futile, though, because the she had other, deeper injuries. Several stab wounds puckered her side. With each belabored breath, blood pulsed from those holes.

Priscilla gave a last, shuddering exhale, and closed her eyes.

* * *

><p>When Brick opened his, he expected to see the bird king. Instead, he was greeted by Amanda's urgent gaze.<p>

"She can't make you do anything, anymore," she said. She held out her hands, tightly fisted, fingers turned upward. She opened them, revealing twin keys cupped in her palms. "Take one, and I'll keep the other. Don't worry. I'll keep it safe."

Brick wordlessly plucked one of the offered objects from his sister's hands. It was one of the keys to the cellar's padlock. Amanda slipped the other into her pocket.

"I stole them last night."

She didn't mention Priscilla, her severed paw clenched in Brick's other hand, or the blood crusting on his pants. Her eyes were red, her lids puffy from crying. She gently curled Brick's fingers around the key.

"Keep yours safe, too. As long as we both have them, it's like we're together. We're a team. Okay?"

"Okay," Brick said. Instead of pocketing his key, he retrieved the chain from the nearby table, the one he'd planned to string Priscilla's paw onto a necklace with, and unclasped it. He dropped the key's loop over the end. It caught the lamplight as it fell into place.

A phantom of worry slipped over Amanda's face. "Are you sure? She'll see it."

"I want her to see," Brick said. "What's she gonna do? Beat me up and take it back? I'm too strong now."

"Then I'll make mine a necklace too. She wouldn't hit me," Amanda said. It wasn't true, but she didn't know it yet. Their momma had never hurt her before, at least not physically.

Amanda grinned. The smile reached her eyes, Brick could see his own face reflected in those wide, umber irises, could see his grim, gray features and the single drop of blood on his cheek, like a beauty mark.

Everyone remarked that Amanda looked like their dad. She'd inherited his dark skin and darker hair, while Brick's looks were his momma's. It was her strong jaw that he saw reflected in Amanda's eyes, his momma's beaky nose and eyes like iron ballbearings. The only thing he shared with Amanda was their daddy's lips, that wide M, and even that wasn't the same. Brick's was broken, split by his momma's wedding ring.


	6. Edge of Town

Brick blinked with reconstructed eyes. His reconstructed stomach threatened to eject its contents, and he clamped his hands over his mouth. He fought back the sting of bile in his throat—swallow, breathe, swallow, breathe—and succeeded. Tina wasn't so lucky. She bent double to splash the polished floors with vomit. The smell nearly pushed the Brick's own battle with nausea into nausea's favor, but he sprinted out of the Fast Travel station before it could overwhelm him.

Outside, the air was sweet and pure, and he swallowed it gratefully. Something itched in the back of mind. Before he could pursue the thought, his animal coiled around it, warning him off with a curled lip.

Brick looked around. The buildings were dark and silent in the sleeping city. Between the roofs, he could see the pinpricks of stars shining brighter than usual, crammed more closely together, as thick as the stars over Menotius.

"We moved," Axton said, coming up behind Brick. He jumped.

"I might be dumb, but I know how the Fast Travel works," he grumbled.

"No, not us. _Sanctuary's _moved."

"You're pullin my leg."

"Nope," Axton said, raising his hand as if to pledge. "I swear. It was the craziest thing..."

He explained it to Brick on the way to the Raider Headquarters, about Wilhelm and the power core, about Angel, and how Lilith had phased the entire city into the air over the Highlands. Brick wondered how he hadn't seen it from his perch in Thousand Cuts.

"Why didn't anyone tell me?" he asked as they reached the HQ.

The building was unguarded, and Axton unlocked the front door with the slide of a keycard. Mordecai hadn't spoken since before the Fast travel, but now he snorted.

"Didn't think you'd give a shit," he said.

Brick followed the others into the HQ. Darkness greeted them downstairs, and they crept across the room by the glow of their shield readouts. The lobby smelled of papers and ink, office smells, but also of the faint reek of gunmetal. A stack of monitors against the far wall cast a faint blue light over the immediate area. It revealed a sleeping Raider slumped over the desk.

Brick heard a man's voice upstairs, yelling at someone, but couldn't make out the words. As they picked their way across the dark HQ, the voice became clearer. Halfway up the stairs, Brick realized the speaker as Roland.

"I saw you throw up this morning. And you're shaking right now!"

"I'm shaking because I'm pissed off," said another voice. This one was Lilith's, and she sounded just as she'd claimed.

"Bullshit. It's eridium poisoning, and you know it. After everything we saw in that lab-"

"But-"

"And that poor man Tannis took apart. He had more of that shit in his veins than blood, and you saw what he was like. And you're still gonna stand here and tell me that you're okay?"

"It's not like I had a choice! I couldn't have moved the city without-"

"Knock knock," Axton interrupted.

Another cluster of monitors lit the Raider hub. Their flickery light deepened the caverns around Lilith's eyes and etched the lines between Roland's furrowed brows. They stood at opposite ends of the central table, fists balled, shoulders hunched. For a moment, they only stared at the group huddled in the doorway.

"We'd better stop fighting, honey," Lilith breathed, almost a laugh. "The kids are home."

Mordecai crossed the room to her and hugged her with gaunt, thin arms, and she hugged him back with arms just as gaunt and thin. She trembled, with either emotion or exhaustion. _Or a symptom of eridium poisoning, _Brick thought.

"Brick, get your ass over here," Lilith barked over Mordecai's shoulder.

He ambled obediently over and wrapped both massive arms around their narrow bodies, giving his friends a brief, affectionate squeeze.

"My best men," Lilith sighed.

When they parted, Roland offered an awkward handshake to Mordecai and an even more awkward handshake to Brick. "Soldier," he said, with a curt nod.

"Issat right? Thought I was a bandit," Brick said.

"Uh..." Roland frowned. "Right. Well..."

"Oh, please. Brick? We'd love to have you back as an official member of the Raiders," Lilith said.

Brick grinned. "I'll think about it."

Tina yawned, a sound like a kitten's tiny mewl. She'd shuffled across the room, zombielike, and come to lean against Roland, for all appearances a child kept up too long past her bedtime.

"Time for bed," Lilith declared. "We can catch up in the morning."

But after Roland took Tina's hand and walked her downstairs, Lilith turned to Mordecai.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

He shrugged. "No. Not really."

She leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. "I know there's nothing I can say to help, but...I'm so, so sorry about Blood. And I love you."

"Love you too, Lil," Mordecai said. Brick could see the blush crossing his cheeks even in the bluish wash of the monitors. "G'night."

"'Night. Love you, Brick."

"Uh, yeah. Love you, too." When she turned to follow Roland downstairs, Mordecai snickered and elbowed him.

"What? You said it too," Brick said.

"Yeah, but you sounded like a dork."

"Men," Gaige said. "Why is it so hard for you to talk about your feelings?"

Axton had been leaning against the wall, nodding off during the brief reunion, but now he straightened up and crossed the space to Gaige.

"What about me? Am I like that?"

"You're especially like that," Gaige snorted.

"Well, how's this? I'm sorry about before. How I acted today. When I meet someone cute, guy or gal, I can't help myself. I look. I flirt, a _lot_-"

"This is a horrible apology."

Axton went on, ignoring Gaige's interruption and the audience who watched them. He took the girl's hands and stared into her eyes.

"I flirt, but that's all. I know you want this to be a monogamous thing, and that's fine with me. I don't need anyone else. For as long as you'll put up with me, I'm all yours."

"Oh. That apology got better," Gaige said.

She went to kiss him, and had to lean up on her toes to reach. That height difference made Brick think, automatically, of Mordecai. His gaze drifted to him, and he found him looking back. As soon as they made eye contact, Mordecai broke it by glancing away.

"So, we're good?" Axton said, grinning down at Gaige.

"Maybe. I've got some demands."

"Kinky."

"OH-kay," Mordecai said. "We'll give you kids some privacy."

"No, no, you don't have to leave. The rest of the bunks are up here. We'll behave ourselves," Axton said.

"I have something I've got to do, anyway," Mordecai said. "And Brick wants to come with me. Right?"

He turned to Brick. He wore his goggles, but Brick could tell from the way his forehead creased that his eyebrows were raised expectantly. Moonlight from the balcony silvered his dreads. To Brick, he looked heartstoppingly beautiful. He nodded dumbly.

"Well...if you really don't mind," Axton said, already turning his face into Gaige's neck.

Mordecai turned around without answering and hurried off, not back to the stairs, but toward the balcony. He reached the opening, put both palms on the sill, and vaulted over the side, disappearing from view.

"Mordy!" Brick yelled. He covered the distance in a heartbeat and looked down over the edge.

"You coming?" Mordecai asked, his face barely a foot below the bottom of the window. He'd landed safely on a lower roof.

A relieved laugh burst from Brick. "Asshole."

He clambered after Mordecai. The slender sniper lit out across the roof, and Brick followed a few paces behind. They crossed a few rooftops that way. Soon, Brick saw something that made him stop.

A flock of birds napped on a roof. Tiny, brown and white birds with rotund bodies, their feathered chests rising and falling in sleep, as charming as anything Brick had ever seen; they seemed almost unreal, like decorations on a Mercenary's Day wreath. Hundreds of them roosted on the slope.

"What're you doing? Let's go," Mordecai said. He slapped Brick on the back like he was trying to spur a stubborn mule.

"I gotta do somethin first."

"What? What do you-"

Brick lunged across the roof, shouting at the top of his lungs—not words, just an emphatic, joyous AHHHH!—his footsteps rattling the slates. His sudden outburst made Mordecai jump. But if Mordecai was surprised, it was nothing compared to the birds' alarm.

They exploded off the roof. The ones nearest to Brick alighted first, and the others followed in turn, as though the flock was living carpet that some invisible being had given a firm shake. The sound of beating wings filled the night. Brick sprinted in the birds' wake, nearly close enough to touch them. He grinned and watched them spiral upward. They began to chide him, as threatening as the tinkle of bells.

Mordecai laughed from behind Brick. "That's what you had to stop for?"

"Yep."

The flock broke into groups, forming incidental shapes of arrows, rivers and ribbons, before they rejoined the main flock, surging upwards and parting again. They never went far, circling around the roof where they'd been roosting. They performed against a backdrop of blue and purple void, shading the silver spatter of stars.

Brick saw a blanket of clouds on the horizon, their bruised, swollen bellies still full of electricity. They had phased out from under the storm.

"Ready to go?" Mordecai said. It was a request, this time, instead of a demand, and the flat palm he placed against Brick's back was too soft to be a slap.

Brick directed his doggish grin down at his friend. Mordecai returned it with a scowl and pulled his hand away.

"Keep up, or I'll leave you behind," he said.

He darted off again, vanishing over the roof's peak. Brick tried not to slip on the bird shit spattered shingles as he followed.

* * *

><p>The Orion boomed its signature thunderclap. Far below, a loader's optic sensor shattered, and the unit toppled forward into the grass.<p>

"Nice," Brick said.

They were sniping loaders from the edge of town. Mordecai had led him to where the asphalt in front of Scooter's garage ended, where the crumbling precipice met open sky. Living in Thousand Cuts and flying buzzards had steeled Brick against any fear of heights, and he'd gone straight to the edge to take in the view.

Here, above the ambient haze of dust and light, the bowl of stars curved forever- an endless, shifting patchwork of blue, purple and silver. The moon and the Helios station seemed close enough to touch. Below, the Highlands rolled and swelled, a choppy sea of grass.

That was the landscape Brick saw through his own rifle's scope, watching Mordecai pick off loaders from the small Hyperion outpost below.

"You do one," Mordecai said. "That's not a pair of binoculars."

Brick tried, but his first round punched into the grass, nowhere near any loaders. The second fared the same. He could practically feel Mordecai rolling his eyes behind his goggles.

"You can do better than that."

"I really can't, Mordy. I'm no good at snipin."

Mordecai sighed. "Okay, get over here. Lemme show you. Look, you're not holding it right. You've got to grip it here and here."

"Here?"

"No, dammit..." Mordecai grumbled as he moved behind Brick. He reached around to grab Brick's hands and forcibly move them down the stock of the rifle, his chin resting on the larger man's shoulder. His beard tickled Brick's neck, his breath was hot in his ear.

If anything, his next shot was worse.

"Breathe, _amigo_. Find your center."

"You a damn yoga teacher or somethin, now?"

Mordecai gave Brick's ear a hard tug. "Nope. Just a better sniper than you."

"Okay, okay. Fair 'nuff," Brick said.

He inhaled deeply, as Mordecai instructed, and tried to forget the other man's proximity. The breath ruffling his neck hairs was more hindrance than a help. He searched for a target and found a stationary GUN loader near the fence.

"Got one in your crosshairs?"

"Yeah."

"Breathe out before you pull the trigger. Slow, controlled exhale."

Brick lined up the shot, so the crosshairs wobbled over the loader's optic sensor, and began to let the air eke out of his lungs. But, right as he meant to squeeze the trigger, Mordecai's grip tightened over his hands.

Mordecai jerked the rifle back hard, so the scope cracked against Brick's temple. Pain and surprise made him fall back on his butt. Mordecai had already darted aside.

"What the hell?" Brick moaned, dropping the rifle to rub his sore head.

"That's for abandoning me, _pendejo. _You think I forgot about that already? Two years, Brick! I didn't see you for two goddamned years!"

"Was hittin me in the head your plan the whole time?"

"No. I just got pissed off. I wanted to snipe. I like to shoot when I can't sleep, which is always. Don't change the topic!"

"Whaddya want me to say?"

"I don't know! Fuck! Do you even give a shit? You never tried to visit, you never called..." He trailed off. _You didn't send a single birthday card,_ he didn't add, but Brick heard it anyway. Even his deadbeat mother had done that much.

Mordecai stood on the precipice of the broken city, arms crossed over his chest. Despite his throbbing head, Brick couldn't help but think that he looked perfect, unkempt beard and wrinkles and all. Instead of getting to his feet, he clambered to one knee and knelt in front of Mordecai. His hands shook as he raised them rest on the other man's hips.

Mordecai stared down at him. The moon was a halo behind his head, outlining him silhouette in silver. His lips turned up in a begrudging smile.

"What? Did I scramble your brains?"

Brick shook his head.

"So, what are you doing? Gay proposing?"

Brick pulled Mordecai closer, pressed his face against his scarf-swaddled waist, and gave a wet, teary snort.

"Forgive me," he said.

"I can't."

"Please! I got no excuse. I know I'm a piece of shit. But, I swear, I ain't ever gonna leave you again. Never, even if you don' forgive me. Even if you don' want me. I'll sleep at the foot of yer bed, or, hell, if you don' want me there, I'll sleep outside your door. It don' matter. I-"

"No, _baboso_. I meant that I can't forgive you because you didn't apologize."

Brick looked up, confused.

"You said forgive me, but you didn't say sorry."

"Oh. 'm sorry."

"Then...I guess I forgive you. You don't even have to sleep outside my door," Mordecai said, and reached down to pet Brick's prickly scalp. "You can sleep in my bed, though. If you want."

Brick laughed, though it sounded more like a sob though his tears. He flopped back onto the asphalt, pulling Mordecai down on top of him.

"Brute!" he scolded. Reclining across Brick's body, he flicked him in the nose. "Be careful. I'm old, you know."

"You ain't so old. If you were, you woulda broken a hip from some of the stuff I used to do to you."

"Shhh," Mordecai hushed him. "Someone could hear."

"Who's gonna hear? Scooter?"

As if summoned by his name, Scooter's exaggerated drawl cut through the night.

**"Hol-ee shit."**


	7. Distraction

Mordecai scrambled to untangle his limbs from Brick's, but it was too late. Scooter had seen enough.

"That's nasty," he announced.

"So's your face," Brick said. "But you don' see us makin a federal case about it."

"This 'splains why you never wanted to put it to my momma when ya'll were together. Does she know?"

"She _told_ you about that? You two have a disturbing relationship," Mordecai said, adjusting his scarf with as much dignity as he could muster.

"When I tell her-"

"No, no you don't. What's it gonna cost to keep this quiet?"

Scooter considered. Brick had pulled himself into a sitting position to face the mouth of Scooter's garage, and he watched the young mechanic mull it over, fingering the bill of his cap with greasy fingers and chewing his lip.

"All your girly mags."

"Half," Mordecai countered.

Scooter hesitated. "Only if I get to pick 'em out."

"Damnit, Scoot, we both know you're going to take all of my huge boob ones."

Scooter shrugged and grinned. His expression said, yeah, but what are you gonna do about it? Mordecai tossed up his hands.

"Fine. I'll let you pick out half my dirty magazines. But if you tell anybody what you saw here, I'm taking them back."

Scooter pumped a triumphant fist, but Brick cleared his throat.

"AND, you let me an Mordy stay at your garage for a couple'a days. Maybe a week."

"What? Hell nah! I don't want no guys rubbing their gay cooties all over my stuff."

"It ain't _your_ stuff I'm looking to rub on," Brick said, chuckling, and earned an elbow in his side from Mordecai.

Scooter blanched. "Nope, no way. Deal's off."

Brick shot a pleading look to Mordecai, who sighed. "All of my mags. They're yours."

That was an offer that Scooter couldn't take lightly. He looked down, scuffing his boots thoughtfully against the asphalt. Finally, he looked back up.

"I dunno..."

"Listen, kid. The deal is, you take my hard-earned magazines, go stay at Mox's place for a few days, since you're obviously very close, and I don't fucking snipe you from a rooftop. How's that?"

This time, Scooter didn't hesitate. "When you put it that way, how could I say no? I'll get my stuff."

"Sounds good," Mordecai said, helping Brick to his feet. He'd been sitting on his leg, and now he rubbed the pins and needles out of the limb. Scooter disappeared into the garage.

"Why'd you go and say that? He's gonna think we're looking for a place to have sex," Mordecai said.

"I was."

Mordecai scoffed. "You think you're back in, just like that?"

Brick turned to face the other man and cupped his jaw in one huge, weathered palm. Mordeai pressed automatically into the touch. Brick leaned in, wanting to kiss him, but hesitated before their lips touched.

"Is it okay?" he asked.

Mordecai answered by leaning into the kiss. They met clumsily, like an echo of that first time in the cave, but their lips quickly remembered their roles. What started as a closed-mouth kiss became a tangle of tongues and swapping of spit, which went on until Scooter reemerged from the garage and retched.

"Gross!"

"So's your face," Brick grunted and released Mordecai, then started across the road toward the garage.

"You already said that," Scooter replied sullenly. "Don't mess with my stuff, okay?"

"We won't," Mordecai said, with a dismissive wave that Scooter didn't see, because he'd already turned and began the trudge to his momma's bar.

As they entered the garage, Brick said, "Thanks for tradin' your porn for this."

"It's fine," Mordecai said. "Joke's on him. A lot of them are _revistas hombres_, anyway."

"Huh?"

"Men mags," Mordecai said. He grinned by oily glow of burnished brass light fixtures.

The garage was on two levels. Stairs connected the spacious bottom floor, where Scooter worked, to the upper level, where he lived. The smell of gasoline was so strong downstairs that it made Brick's eyes sting. For a moment, he was transported to his home in Thousand Cuts. The smell abated upstairs, giving way to an almost pleasant human headiness. Only a few lights remained on at this late hour. The dim light bronzed the steely glint of metal, softened edges, and made the garage into a den of cozy shadowed recesses and golden patches of lamplight.

Scooter's bed was an elevated nest. The tangle of blankets and stained pillow looked like they might have never been washed before, and Brick dismissing them immediately.

"Where do you wanna...?" he asked.

"How do you even know I want to? Maybe I just want to sleep."

"Uh, Mordy? You're grabbin my ass."

Mordecai had pulled him into an embrace even as he objected to the question, his hands roving over Brick's hips and butt. He laughed against the larger man's chest.

"You got me. I haven't gotten laid in..." he withdraw one hand to count on his fingers. "Since the last time I got with you."

"Oh," Brick said. Not knowing what else to say, he took the hand Mordecai held up in both of his own. He bit the tip of his glove and slowly tugged it off. The only sound in the garage was the soft shush of leather sliding over flesh.

"Are you trying to seduce me? Because, it's kind of working," Mordecai said.

Brick grunted a monosyllabic response and worked a trail of kisses down the other man's bare palm and narrow wrist. When he tried to let him go, Mordecai snatched his hands back. He licked the tip of one index finger, and, with a telling blush spreading across his cheeks, took the whole finger into his mouth, sucking it to the base.

Brick gasped. He felt the gentle pressure of Mordecai's teeth against his skin, but was still surprised when his friend withdrew and dragged a ring up with him. He let the ring drop from his mouth into his own cupped hand, showed it off with an embarrassed quirk of his lips, then palmed it back to its owner.

"Whoah. Yours was better," Brick breathed.

Mordecai laughed and covered his face. Brick grabbed him by the wrists, forced his hands aside, and kissed him thoroughly.

They undressed each other between kisses, exploring each newly bared expanse with trembling, reverent hands. The clatter of rings and rustle of fabric seemed too loud in the garage. Brick reached down to place a splayed hand against Mordecai crotch, thumbing up the dark hairs that crept all the way to his navel. His hand followed that trail, pushing his shirt up as he went. He felt Mordecai's lean, muscular torso and alarmingly prominent ribs with his fingertips, then with his mouth, making the smaller man suck a shuddering breath.

The bed was disgusting in its current state, but after a glance around, Brick spotted a folded blanket on one of the shelves. He took it by the corners and shook the dust out of it, shoved the rest of the bedding off the mattress (grimacing at the 'crunchy' quality of the sheets) and replaced them with the fresh blanket, tucking it in around the corners.

Mordecai pushed Brick back on the bed, urging him to lay out. He wrestled Brick's shirt off so he could plant a line of stubbly kisses down the larger man's abs, across his naval, coming to mouth at the tented crotch of his jeans.

Brick groaned and reached down to undo his belt. His fly was down an instant after, and as soon as his erection sprang free, Mordecai curled his fingers around the base. Without even the testing lick he'd given his finger, he swallowed it deep.

At first Brick could do nothing but grip the sheets and writhe under Mordecai's inexpert enthusiasm, could think of nothing but the glorious wet heat around his cock. But, after a moment, he laughed.

Mordecai pulled away. "I know I'm a little rusty, but it's not that funny."

"Sorry. I was thinkin about the first time you tried to do that."

"Oh, God, not this."

"You puked."

"You're making it sound like I threw up on you. I went around the corner, you couldn't even see me. _And,_ I told you a hundred times that I'm sorry."

"You...you were drunk...and sick with that stomach thing...You tol' me," Brick said, struggling to string together the words, because Mordecai had started laboring over his dick again, suckling gently at the pinch of skin below the head.

"And I was nervous," Mordecai said, murmuring against sensitive flesh. "It was my first time giving a blowjob."

"My first time getting one, too," Brick confessed.

Mordecai's head snapped up as though he'd been struck. "Seriously? Like...first-first?"

"You're makin me feel weird about it."

"No, its...well, that is a little weird. I'm flattered, though." He paused to run his tongue up and down Brick's shaft. "But that means I messed up your first time."

"You made it up to me."

Brick had been nervous that first blowjob, too. Mordecai throwing up had been a shock, but after he'd explained that it wasn't anything personal, that he was sick, Brick had been almost relieved to shift gears into taking care of his friend. They'd tried again barely a week later, and that time...

Mordecai had wrapped his lips around him again, and the thought of that successful attempt drove Brick to thrust his hips reflexively into his mouth. Mordecai gagged and gave a punishingly hard suck before withdrawing.

"Careful, _amigo._"

"Sorry," Brick said, flashing a sheepish grin.

But Mordecai didn't resume. Instead, he wriggled up Brick's body until they were face to face. With their groins flush together, Brick could feel how hard Mordecai was. His dick pulsed between the press of their bodies.

"You can..." Brick started to say, only to be briefly interrupted when Mordecai prized his lips for another kiss. "...take me. If you want."

"Nah. I want to ride you. I've missed that feeling. Your cock hitting everything inside me," Mordecai whispered obscenely against Brick's lips. The vulgarity made him blush as Mordecai straddled him.

"Wow. That's...wow."

"Gimme a break. I'm drunk."

"But you're not," Brick pointed out. "Not this time."

"_Mi amor, mi cielo, mi pata de perro, _please...shut up and fuck me."

Mordecai didn't wait for him to answer. Brick's hands had been roving at the other man's ass and thighs, making circles with his thumb over lean musculature, but Mordecai reached down to capture one of of those groping hands. He brought it up to his mouth and pressed his lips to the palm. He must have felt the wedge-shaped welt there, seen the skin seared smooth, but didn't remark on it. He ceased kissing to bring two of Brick's fingers into his mouth again. The playful shyness of the last suckle was gone, replaced by brazen greed. He locked eyes with Brick while he sucked on the digits, slicking them with spit.

A rivulet trickled through the fork of Brick's fingers and into his palm. It made him think, absurdly, of promises sealed with spit between clasped hands. Mordecai released Brick with his mouth but kept his grip on his wrist. He forced his hand down, between his legs, to the cleft of his ass.

_Oh,_ Brick thought, and obeyed the unspoken command. Mordecai hissed in pain, despite the prep of spit, as Brick's finger slicked into him. Brick tried to pull away, but Mordecai caught his wrist again. He pushed up against the larger man's chest, sitting up, effectively trapping his hand.

"'m fine," he said, wriggling a little. The tight heat around Brick's finger sent an almost painful dagger of lust between his own legs. "It's just been a long time. I just...ah...I'll..."

He trailed off as he relaxed, allowing Brick deeper entry. They went like that for awhile, Mordecai holding Brick in place and grinding down on his digits, first one, then two, pausing briefly for more spit to ease entry. Brick thought again of promises. This promise, the vow to never leave again, Brick consummated between their bodies, with heat and closeness, and Mordecai clutching his wrist like he would never let it go.

Eventually, Mordecai did release his hand, but only to quickly replace Brick's fingers with his dick. This time, there was no easing into it, no reflexive clench and slow relaxation. He took Brick's full length with barely a hitch of hesitation.

Brick barked, wheezed, grabbed Mordecai's hips. Colorless fireworks burst behind his eyes. Not orgasm, but perilously close. He held Mordecai in place, waiting for the overload of sensation to diminish. The lithe man in his lap wriggled impatiently, plying him with promises in Spanish, words he didn't understand but which sent a direct line of communication to his hips, making them arch upward.

Mordecai rode him, controlling the speed and depth, his own cock lying hard against Brick's belly. The larger man reached up to grip him, giving the shaft a rolling squeeze, all the way from the dripping head to the dark, damp patch of hair around the base. He struck a firm, easy rhythm, stroking in time with Mordecai clenching around him.

A steady stream of Spanish and English obscenities flowed from the Mordecai's mouth, his head lolling back to reveal the long slope of his stubbly neck. His eyes were slitted by pleasure, but Brick didn't allow himself the same. He kept his own eyes open. He memorized every freckle and mole, every bead of sweat that rolled across the gauntlet of his friend's angular body.

Mordecai leaned across Brick body to kiss him, and moaned into his mouth—_mas duro, mi amor, m__e encanta como me haces_—and the vulgarities around the endearment weren't enough to disguise it. Brick gripped Mordecai's hips and thrust into him, forgetting gentleness in the throes of climax. Mordecai's only admonishment was to bite his neck, hard enough that there would be a ringed bruise in the morning, before succumbing to his own orgasm- the throb felt between their tightly pressed bodies.

They rolled apart, panting. Brick found a folded rag on the same shelf where they'd gotten the blanket and wiped up both of them. Mordecai wriggled into the crook of Brick's arm with a contented hum, draped an arm over the larger man's chest, and tweaked an unsuspecting nipple. Brick yelped and swatted him away.

"Your pits stink," Mordecai complained.

"Want me to go wash or somethin'?"

"No," he said, pulling Brick tighter against him.

The warmth of Mordecai's body lulled Brick into a doze. He was stirred from sleep when he felt his necklace slide against his skin, and he reached up automatically to still it.

"Sorry."

Brick opened his eyes. Mordecai grinned up at him, looking as sleepy as Brick felt- his eyes the color of a stormy sea under long, dark lashes. He'd been fiddling with Brick's necklace when he was interrupted, and he curled his fingers around the chain again.

"I used to wear this damn thing to sleep. Back when we thought you were dead."

Brick's eyes widened. His mouth opened, but nothing came out.

"Don't look so surprised. I missed you. And, please, it's not like you'd be any different. I've seen you cry over ECHO advertisements."

"That was one time," Brick argued, but it was a halfhearted rebuttal. He was distracted. Mordecai's words had startled him, but he wasn't sure why. The reason lingered around the peripheries of his mind, but when he tried to focus on it, it slipped aside. His animal watched him struggle with a laugh in each cruel eye.

"It was a touching ad," Mordecai admitted. "I'm just saying, you really can't judge me for crying over my dead best friend."

"I ain't judgin'. And...you didn't tell me you cried. You just said you wore m' necklace."

But he didn't have to. Brick already knew it, because the moon told him.

Suddenly, his animal slid away, and the whole nightmare tumbled free of its coils. Brick trembled under the force of revelation.

_You wanted to see,_ his animal seemed to say. _I can't protect you don't let me. _But Brick hadn't known what his animal hid behind its mottled side.

He had never forgotten about what happened to Pris. He carried that terrible morning wherever he went, just as he carried her paw around his neck. But his animal had cast its long shadow over the memory, obscuring the details.

The crows...! He hadn't thought about the crows in years. And eating the apple peel, waiting for his momma to say something she'd never said before, something she never would say. And Hell, of course. The imagined landscapes of the nightmare rendered in just as much vivid detail as the real ones.

_ Maybe they're not imagined,_ his animal goaded, dropping the guise of Brick's guardian; no longer an animal at all, but a devil. _Maybe, instead of limbo, you actually passed through Hell._

"Brick?"

Mordecai waved a hand in front of Brick's face, and he blinked.

"What?"

"I was talking to you. You okay?"

For a second, Brick considered telling Mordecai everything. All about the dream, and the memories dredged up with it. But to tell him about Pris would be to confess the parts about Emmett, the threat of the cellar. So, he bit his tongue.

"'m fine. Just tired."

Mordecai didn't look convinced. He studied Brick's face for clues, green eyes darting over his features, but, finding no answer, turned his gaze up to the ceiling. Brick looked there as well.

Studded steel beams criss-crossed the roof. Through them, Brick could see the corrugated tin of the garage's roof. When he stared for long enough, he could swear something moved in that shadowy cavern. Birds, he guessed.

"Blood would be sleepin' up there," Mordecai mused, his voice heavy with exhaustion. "Hey. Thanks for not making me talk about her."

The gratitude in those words cut Brick to his core. Avoiding the topic of Mordecai's dead bird had been no act of will, but his usual self-absorption. He hadn't thought about Blood at all. The sight of Mordecai's moonlit face, the longing it filled him with, and the urge to have him, had left no room for anything else in his mind.

Throat swelled shut by shame, Brick didn't reply. Mordecai's breathing had changed, anyway, deepening in sleep, his face turned into the Brick's side.

He tried to do the same, but tumultuous thoughts kept him awake. Thoughts about his momma and Pris, and especially of his little sister. She'd saved him so many times. Even as a baby, she used to cry to distract their momma when she started in on him.

And she'd saved him from the cellar.

Brick decided to go to Lynchwood as soon as possible. The photo he'd found in Rocko's book was old, but any lead was worth pursuing. Absolved by the decision, his mind finally allowed him to sleep.

When he woke, he felt like he'd only been sleeping for a second, but a shift in the light told him it had been longer. The light trickling in from outside had been silver. Now, through the small window overlooking the garage's upstairs exit, Brick saw clouds blocking out the stars. They looked like the storm clouds from before, purple with bruises the color of pus.

The storm answered with a deafening clap of thunder. Mordecai was missing from the bed.

Lightning followed and washed out the garage like an overexposed photo. Just as the light bleached the shadows out of the world, a crash came from downstairs. Brick sat up, straining to listen.

"Fuck!"

The voice was Mordecai's. The curse rattled through the rafters, making the birds―real or imagined―stir in their nests. Though Mordecai uttered only the single, slurred syllable, it was enough for Brick to know he'd been drinking.

Another crash made him spring from the bed. He descended the staircase in darkness.


	8. Naked

Thunder boomed outside, playing the drafty garage like a drum.

At first, Brick didn't see Mordecai. His eyes went straight to the overturned workbench and the tools strewn across the floor. A Technical on blocks bore a new dent. Not just a dent: the shell had been completely caved in on one side. The divot looked like a scowl mouth in the shadows.

Brick tracked the path of destruction to were Mordecai sat on the floor nearby, knees pulled up, head bowed into crossed arms. A bottle dangled from one hand, a wrench from the other.

"Mordy?"

If Mordecai heard, he gave no indication. Brick hurried across the room to him, picking his way around car parts and tools, and fell to both knees in front of his friend. His kneecaps hit the oil stained concrete with a crack, but the pain was distant, unimportant.

He grabbed Mordecai's forearms and shook him. His hands wrapped all the way around Mordecai's thin limbs so his thumb and forefingers met, and even in the face of this new fear, that unhealthy gauntness worried Brick.

"Mordy, what's wrong?"

"I thought it was done with me," Mordecai moaned, the words muffled against his knees. Brick finally noticed that the smaller man was still naked; they both were. Mordecai trembled in his grasp.

"You thought what was done with you?"

"How could I be so stupid? But, it stayed away for so long. I thought...because I didn't believe it, you know? I could tell it wasn't really her."

"Snap out of it!" Brick shook him harder. Half-asleep, he'd thought Mordecai might have stumbled over the table, that maybe the dent in the technical wasn't new, that he'd only missed it before. But it quickly became apparent that Mordecai had inflicted the damage himself, in some kind of drunken black-out. Or...what had he called it, back in the junkyard? A fugue.

"Wake the fuck up, Mordy! You're scarin' the shit outta me."

Mordecai looked up. His pupils jangled like cherries behind the dirty plastic window of a slot machine. Last time Brick saw that glazed look, it had been full of purple sparks- reflections of eridium spires. Lightning flashed to the accompaniment of thunder, briefly turning Mordecai's eyes into round, white saucers. Then they returned to normal; or, at least, to the way they had been.

"She was dead. More bullet holes than bird, blood everywhere, and feathers, too. On my bedroom floor. But that didn't happen! When he got to pounding on my door and screaming at me to get out, there was something in there with me, and he was gonna to take care of it, I _knew_ it was a trick. He wanted to kill me. I never let him in! Sometimes, sometimes I wanted to. Screw it, right? Have it done with. But I had Blood, and if I was dead, who would feed her? Or maybe he would find her, too, and shoot her, and I couldn't let him do that, so I NEVER. LET. HIM. IN."

"What're you talkin about?" Brick begged.

"I'm saying, that wasn't Blood! My dad never killed her." Mordecai's features twisted into a triumphant grin. "It didn't like that I figured it out. It wanted to know what I would do to save her, but I wouldn't play along, so it went away. For a year. I thought..." The triumph drained out of his face, leaving a childlike fear in its wake.

Brick pulled Mordecai into his arms, crushing his frail, unresistant body against his chest.

"What went away?" he asked, not knowing why he bothered. Mordecai hadn't answered any of his other questions; in fact, he seemed not to hear him at all. But Mordecai surprised him.

"The moon."

"It came back," he continued, after Brick didn't respond. He couldn't. Words had been ripped from him, along with the air from his lungs. "There was a bird this time. It swallowed me. Oh, God, it picked me up and stuffed me into its beak and I was screaming and screaming, but every time I opened my mouth, _birds _came out of me, out of _everywhere_."

"Crows," Brick said.

Mordecai pushed away from his chest, easily breaking the other man's slackening grip. Brick saw a sliver of cognizance come back in his eyes.

"I'm going mad," Mordcai insisted.

"It was a blue bird, with human arms, right? And a crown."

"No. No, not a crown. It was...a cauldron, I think."

"With three little feet. But a kid might think it was a crown. Like, the bird was sittin on a throne, with everyone bowing to it, so if you were a kid, you might think the pot was a crown."

Mordecai's eyes had nearly returned to normal now. The pupils remained two tiny points in a sea of green iris, but the emptiness had lifted.

"That kid...was you?"

Brick told him about the painting. Everything, even the parts that didn't matter. How his momma brought the triptych home the day after he stumbled onto a drowned body, so he thought the shapes in the water were corpses. About the naked heathens in the Garden, and his momma's warning about them and their kingdom—don't go down to the Garden—and even about the lights beyond the mountain. How Amanda thought it was a glimpse of heaven, while Brick could only see fire.

And, of course, about the bird king, whose wickering Brick had imagined hearing in the depths of the cellar, in that pit his momma sometimes cast him into: a hell for the devil who lived inside him.

"You must have told me this before," Mordecai said.

"Nope. Never told no-one."

Mordecai was still holding the bottle, but now he threw it, hard. It shattered against one of the Technical's supporting blocks, sending shards of glass skittered across the floor.

"This is crazy! I'm gong nuts, just like my dad."

"No! I donno what's going on, but it ain't in your head. I been dreaming about the moon, too."

So Brick told him more: about the nightmare he'd had during the Fast Travel. He omitted his premonition about something happening to Pris, because that would lead to the truth about the cellar, but otherwise told him the whole dream, including his own side of the bird king parts.

While Brick talked, other thoughts came to him. His animal had only relinquished the most recent dream, but now it bequeathed him everything, snaking off with only its own bloody memories clenched in its coils. A scattering of images lay in its wake- things it had sought to protect Brick from. Emmett's blood streaking the bathtub. The brand of pain across his lip.

"Maybe we're both crazy," Mordecai conceded.

"Maybe."

Mordecai was in his arms again, of his own will, this time. Brick could feel the frail sniper trembling, could feel the bumpy skin on his his neck and arms where chills gripped him.

"The dreams got worse after you left," Mordecai said, breathing the words against the underside of Brick's chin. "Almost every night. I could only sleep when I passed out drunk, and then they came anyway. The moon kept making me remember when I found my mom. I found out where she was living, and spied it out through my scope, hiding in the hills like a scared little prick. She was with her new family. But my finger slipped, and I pulled the trigger. Her brains, splat, all over her new kid."

Brick swallowed, and Mordecai felt it through his throat. "In the dream! I found her in real life, but I didn't really shoot her. I...I thought about it. Not like I was going to do it. Just, for a moment, I couldn't stop thinking about how I was watching her from down the barrel of a rifle."

"What's it mean?" Brick wondered aloud.

"Probably that my mom's a cold-blooded bitch, and I'm just like her."

Brick blinked. "No. The moon stuff."

"Oh," Mordecai said. He punctuated the pause with a few owlish blinks of his own, looking around the garage like he was seeing the mess for the first time. "I don't know. I guess there's someone in our heads. Reading our minds, controlling our dreams. But...that's impossible."

"Yeah," Brick agreed.

"Guardians?" That's what we called them, right? Those aliens who tried to stop us from opening the vault."

"Could be, I s'pose. Maybe. I donno."

Mordecai groaned and clutched his head. "Me either. Christ, my head hurts. Brick...I can feel it getting closer."

"The moon?"

"No."

Lightning crashed like cymbals. Every hair on Brick's body stood up, as though that bolt of electricity had found entrance into the garage and struck only him.

He didn't know what Mordecai could feel getting closer, but his first thought was of his animal. It had abandoned him to his memories, but now he could feel its presence again and hear its ugly, bestial heartbeat. He was about to ask Mordecai what he meant, when the man in his arms continued.

"The madness is right behind me. It got my dad, and it's coming for me, too, and...I'm scared."

Not knowing the words to express the feelings that churned in his gut—love like a bleeding wound, sorrow like a bruise—Brick lifted Mordecai's chin, instead, and plied his mouth in a slow, sweet kiss.

The sensual slide of their tongues reminded Brick that they were still very naked. Mordecai seemed to remember, too, because his trembling fingers traced up Brick's bare thigh and came to rest between his legs.

They made a fumbling kind of love, groping amid the grease stained tools and the smell of gasoline, more naked than naked on the cold, concrete floor. They did it sitting face to face, lengths pressed together and stroked by one of Brick's large, loose fists. Mordecai's arms wrapped around the taller man's neck, his lips pressed to his ear. He whispered no obscenities this time. He only panted, deep and slow at first, like he'd tried to teach Brick to do while sniping...a very distant echo of those first, amazed 'oh's. Soon his inhalations grew quick and ragged. His only concession to dirty talk was a gasped, _Brick!_ Just before he came.

Outside, thunder growled, but more distantly.

The tension drained out of him, out of both of them. Mordecai folded into the other man's arms, limp as a doll. Brick carried him upstairs. There, he laid him in bed, helped him clean up and struggle into some clothes. It wasn't easy. Mordecai's skin was too hot, his forehead clammy and pale. He moaned weakly that his head was killing him. Brick pressed a kiss to that worrisome temple as he slipped back into sleep.


	9. Hanged Men

When Mordecai finally replied over the ECHO, he began with a long-suffering sigh.

"What?"

"I wanted to ask if you want anythin' from town," Brick said.

"You asked me that ten minutes ago. I told you to pick up booze. But, sneak it in. Zed's trying to cut me off." Under his breath, he muttered; _Damn quack..._

"Booze. Right."

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. The only sound was the hushed rumble of the train, and another passenger snoring softly. Finally, Mordecai sighed again.

"Go ahead. Ask," he said, his voice coming out choked and hoarse, the same croak that had scared Brick that morning.

"Are you feelin better?"

"A little. But hurry, okay? I'll feel even better when you get home. Am I on speaker?"

"Yeah. I'll take ya off," Brick said, pushing a command into his ECHO unit.

Into Brick's ear, Modecai proceeded to tell him all the ways he could make him feel better when he got back, and all the ways he'd repay him, in vivid, colorful detail, in that gravelly voice that was so alarming but also alluringly husky, until Brick was writhing and covering his face to hide the deep blush forming across his cheeks. Axton sat in the seat across from him. He watched Brick's discomfort with a smirk, and Brick tried to avoid his gaze.

"R-right, okay," Brick stuttered. "I'll do that."

"And stop calling me! I'm fine, I swear. Zed says I'll be back to normal in a couple days," Mordecai said.

"Yeah, sure. It's just...you know..."

"I know. I love you, too."

Before Brick could wheeze a response, Mordecai hung up, cutting off the ECHO's background of static.

He stared out the window to avoid Axton's pointed stare, although there was nothing to see out there except what he'd already seen: an unbroken arid wasteland, same as almost all of Pandora, aptly named 'the Dust'.

The last time Brick visited the area was to drop off Frank. The skag had been sweet on that final drive, with no sign of the bloodthirsty nature that necessitated his exile. It had taken all of Brick's willpower to drive away from the abandoned mine, forcing himself not to look back at the confused skag falling further and further behind.

"You didn't come back to HQ last night," Axton said, jogging Brick out of his thoughts.

He shrugged. "Stayed at Scooter's place. Me 'n Mordy were snipin late, and it was a long walk back to..." he paused. "Would ya stop lookin at me like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like...I donno!"

Axton chuckled and looked out the grimy, scratched plastic windowpane. The train rumbled under their feet. It was a relatively new Hyperion passenger train, used for shuttling workers to and from the Lynchwood mines, but Pandora's harsh elements had already begun to take a toll on it. Sandstorms had scraped raw sections of the yellow and black exterior, and bandits had pocked grooves out of the windows with their gunfire. But the interior remained intact, smelling of plastic and boasting slick vinyl seats and a clean, polished floor that squeaked when Brick ground a boot toe against it.

"How's Gaige?" he asked.

"Terrible. Puking a lot. But I haven't been calling every five minutes, so I don't know her _exact_ condition."

Brick glared at him, but Axton only smirked and shrugged. In the disguise he'd chosen—a fake goatee and a military cap to conceal his naturally sandy hair—he looked even more roguishly irreverent.

"I'm not saying there's anything wrong with checking in, but you gotta let him rest. He's probably trying to sleep but he's too polite to tell you to fuck off."

"You don't know Mordy. He don't have a polite bone in his body. See this goose-egg? He brained me with a rifle last night." Brick lifted the eyepatch strap (part of his own disguise) away from the discolored bump on his forehead.

"I saw that. I thought it was a headboard related injury," Axton said.

Brick gave him a long, blank look. Axton stared back, his expression equally inscrutable. Finally, he leaned forward to prop an elbow on one knee.

"Look. You _carried_ him into the HQ this morning, practically crying, screaming for someone to get a doctor. You're not exactly in the closet."

"He was burning up! What was I supposed to do?"

"I understand. But if you don't mind me saying, you can't be too careful on these border-worlds. Pandora, Heironymous, Menoetius—" at the mention of his home planet, Brick perked up. "Back on Theia, when my partner got shot by some scumbag, I was scared shitless, sure. It was touch and go for awhile, but I didn't let anyone see how much I was freaking out. And I sure as hell didn't kiss him on the forehead."

"I'm not...I didn't kiss nobody," Brick argued.

"I don't know how to tell you this, buddy, but you did."

Brick tried to remember. The morning was a blur: Waking up to find Mordecai writhing half off the bed, muttering nonsense, so feverish that Brick could feel the heat radiating from him without even touching. _Hurts,_ Mordecai had croaked. Unable to remember where Doc Zed's office was, Brick had carried him to the Raider HQ.

He'd almost decided not to go to Lynchwood, even after he'd discovered that Axton was already planning to infiltrate the town on Raider business, but Mordecai had urged him to go. Zed said it was just a virus: nausea and a nasty fever. Gaige had woken up in the same condition.

Still, Brick had worried over Mordecai's bedside until Axton said it was time to leave. They had to board a train with stolen Hyperion I.D.s and get into town that way, because Hyperion had restricted Lynchwood's Fast Travel access to registered citizens, and it would take half the day to get there. Mordecai had pushed Brick away with a frail, shaking hand.

And, Brick remembered now, he had leaned down to kiss Mordecai's feverish temple before leaving.

"Your partner? You mean...?" Brick asked.

"Yep," Axton said, his voice conspiratorially low. "But we didn't go around advertising it. And not just because folks on the border-worlds aren't always so open-minded. Guys like you and me, we've earned a few enemies. If you're not careful, and the wrong people find out who you care about, it can get ugly."

_Too late for that. _Someone already knew how much Mordecai meant to Brick. The moon, or whatever it represented, had used one of Brick's childhood nightmares to devour Mordecai, and who knew what it might do in the waking world?

"Ain't nothin so ugly I can't make uglier with my old one-two," Brick said, sounding more sure than he felt, and smacked a fist into his open palm. "I wouldn't let nobody hurt Mordy."

"That's what I thought, too," Axton shrugged. He stared out the window for a stretch of seconds, and Brick wondered what exactly had happened to his partner. Then he turned back to Brick.

"Anyway, if you're sure. I wouldn't worry about your friends finding out. I think they already know."

"Nah, no way. They-"

Brick was cut off by a sudden scream. He jolted and whirled around, searching for the source of the sound, before realizing that it wasn't a scream at all, but the train's breaks. They slowed abruptly, nearly pitching Brick onto Axton's lap. The other man reached up to steady him. The light dimmed. Outside the window, a shadowy interior replaced the seemingly endless tide of sand and bluffs. Soon, the train squalled to a stop.

A Hyperion attendant checked their identification again as they deboarded the train. They were posing as two convicts who the Dahl corporation had shuttled from an off-world prison to work in the eridium mines, who were later hired by Hyperion for the same. The Crimson Raiders had killed the two men in an attack of a Hyperion outpost, but had taken their identification cards and chips for infiltration.

The guard waved them past, and they stepped onto the platform. Streamers of sunlight daggered through the station's large open end, revealing slow-swimming schools of dust motes. The train had been air conditioned, almost chilly, but the platform was pleasantly warm. Brick stretched, coaxing the cramped stillness out of his limbs.

"Let's go," Axton urged, under his breath. "I want to get to the demolitions depository before sundown. It's gonna be a long walk to the nearest Fast Travel station after we blow this place up."

That was what the Raiders had sent them to Lynchwood to do- destroy Hyperion's means of transporting eridium. Brick had already informed Axton of his other purpose, but he wasn't sure when or how we would go about searching for Amanda.

He followed Axton to the other end of the station. They went down a shadowy stairwell, into a corridor where a Marcus munitions vending machine winked neon promises to them, beckoning through tinny speakers.

Someone just around the corner was talking, and Axton and Brick paused to listen.

"I heard Blue rolled into town this morning. Sheriff must be pleased."

Another voice, this one scratchy and strange, replied; "Nope. Jusssssst a ghossssst."

"Are you kidding me? Holy hell in a hotcake. She's gonna be-"

"Yessssss."

"Does she know yet?"

"Don't reckon sssssso."

"Well, shoot. We can't let her stumble across it. We gotta say something."

"_You_ going to tell her?"

The other voice hesitated for a long while, making Axton and Brick both lean forward in anticipation.

"On second thought...maybe not."

Axton rounded the corner without warning Brick, and the larger man stumbled after him. Outside, he came face to face with the people they'd been eavesdropping on. One was a man wearing a parka more suited for chillier weather, the other an impossibly skinny miner in a gas mask. They leaned against the station's wooden facade and jumped when Axton emerged from the doorway.

"I can tell the Sheriff for you," Axton offered.

"Who the hell are you?" the skinny man hissed.

"Fresh meat." Axton flashed his badge, not long enough for the men to make out the details. "We got in on the last train. We're miners, but we were kinda hoping to make a good impression with the higher ups. Get noticed, get promoted. That's the dream, right?"

The first speaker, the one who'd expressed a desire to tell the Sheriff about the ghost, shook his head.

"Sorry, son, but if you're looking to get noticed, this ain't the best way-"

The other man elbowed him. "Don't be hassssssty."

"It's fine, really," Axton insisted. "We'll break the news to her easy."

The parka clad figure seemed uncertain. "Well. If you're sure. You know where her office is?"

"First day," Brick reminded.

"Right. This here's Main Street. Take a left, you'll come across Gunslinger's corner. You can't miss it. Really, you can't. Just follow that road until you find the building with a great big sheriff's badge on the sign."

"Thanks. You won't regret this," Axton said, tipping his cap respectfully toward the two men as he backed toward the stairs leading to town.

"I won't, but you probably will."

Brick followed Axton down the stairs and into the dusty street. The town reminded him of those in the old Earth westerns, like the one in the Lawbringer: all dirt roads and ramshackle wooden buildings, wrap around porches, and dirty men leaning against railings. The Pandoran sun, starting already to dip behind the rooftops, cast stark shadows over the faces of buildings and bandits alike.

Thinking of the Lawbringer reminded Brick of Amanda.

"Are we goin to ask the Sheriff about my sister?" he asked Axton.

The locals watched them with a facade of indifference, but Brick caught the hunger in their stares, probably sizing up their credit accounts.

"That's the plan, unless you've got a better one."

"How do you know she'll tell us?"

"I wasn't thinking we'd ask nice," Axton said.

"Oh."

That was alright. The Sheriff would be someone appointed by Hyperion, after all, and Brick never felt bad for them. When they found Gunslinger's Corner, he knew he would have even less qualms about extracting information the hard way. The men by the station were right; the corner was impossible to miss. A wooden post on the corner declared 'Gunslinger's Corner', but above that spanned a larger sign, one that towered above the intersection and all the way across the road, which read, 'LYNCHWOOD' in chipped, sloppily scrawled paint.

From the sign hung bodies. They swung lazily from their nooses, stirred by a barely perceptible breeze. Dark tongues bulged from their mouths. A few seemed to have been there for a long time, men whose clothing clung to their bodies in decayed tatters, their skin drawn tight against their skulls. Others were so fresh they looked like they might call down for help.

"Holy shit," Axton said, and whistled low. "Arm of the law's mighty long 'round these parts."

Brick nodded in mute agreement. They continued down the road, but now the town had taken on a more sinister quality. The bandits-turned-miners continued to watch them from the shadows, but now the greedy glitter in their eyes seemed to promise murder as much as theft. It felt like they walked for a long while before the sheriff badge sign swelled into view. (huge, just as hard to miss as the hanged men)

"Looks just like it used to," Axton said. When Brick looked at him with a questioning eyebrow raised, he added, "I did a few jobs around here before Hyperion."

They swung inside the sheriff's office through double doors. The inside, like the outside, was fashioned so faithfully after the classic old west that it bordered on parody. A single cell with metal bars took up he left side of the room, a chunky wooden desk dominated the right. Beyond that was a door. Nobody manned the desk or occupied the cell.

Axton nudged Brick and whispered, "Looks like the new sheriff's a kinky gal."

He gestured to the wall above the desk. Hanging from a rack was a variety of whips and switches, leather masks, and things Brick couldn't even guess the purpose of.

"Hello?" Axton called. "Is the sheriff here?"

A woman's voice from the back room responded. "What do you want?"

"We've got a message we're supposed to give the sheriff."

A measured silence followed. "From who?"

The voice sounded familiar to Brick. He wanted to go to the doorway and look in, but Axton didn't move in that direction, and it would be better to draw the sheriff out.

"I'm supposed to tell you there's, uh..." Under Axton's breath, he muttered—_What the hell was it?—_then snapped his fingers. "A blue ghost. Blue's ghost?"

After another pregnant pause, the sheriff emerged through the doorway. Shocked, Brick took a step back.

It was Nisha. She'd changed her hair, and now she wore a sheriff's badge on her vest, almost as absurdly large and shiny as the one on the sign outside, but it was still Nisha the Lawbringer: the Hyperion commander who'd killed Dusty with her bare hands, who had tossed Brick in prison and ordered Kindle and Tina to be locked away with him.

He could almost hear Kindle's words. _She said it'd be be funny_.

Nisha seemed to recognize him, too, because a knowing smile spread across her face. Her hand twitched by her side, poised over her revolver.

"Howdy, Brick."


	10. Hunger

"Oh, you've met?" Axton asked. He gave his side a casual scratch, but Brick guessed he was reaching for a concealed weapon.

"Hands up!" Nisha barked.

"Okay! No problem," Axton said.

He raised his hands obediently but he clutched something in one fist. Nisha spotted it and drew her revolver, lightning fast, and shot the object out of Axton's hand. It was a tiny pistol, and it skittered across the floor and came to a stop against Brick's boots.

Nisha laughed. "You'll need a bigger gun than that to kill me."

"We're just here to talk. Right, Brick?"

But Brick was glazed over, locked in battle with an invisible enemy. His animal struggled against him. It wanted to kill Nisha, to squeeze the life out of her with Brick's bare hands, just like she'd done to Dusty. With Nisha dead, Brick would be safe.

But that was stupid. Nisha wasn't a threat to him anymore. He could kill her. _Would. _But first, he had to find out about Amanda.

"Brick," Nisha repeated, smirking. "I knew it was you. I didn't know you lost an eye, though. Did that happen in prison?"

Brick's fists tightened by his sides. He forced his animal back, back, back.

"How'd you like my presents, by the way? I never got around to the Fathoms to check in on you. Did you keep them for yourself, or did you share with the other prisoners? Or...did they take them from you by force?" She laughed again, her voice like a crow's cackle.

"Monster," Brick whispered.

He trembled from the effort of restraint. Axton looked back and forth between them, his hands slowly lowering to his sides.

"Keep em' up!" Nisha demanded as she waved her revolver.

"Uh...no thanks," Axton said.

"Excuse me?"

Axton's hand dropped to his belt, where he'd hidden his digistruct device. He blindly pressed a code into its interface. Nisha's arm jerked, once, twice, filling Axton's shield with bullets as fast as she could pull the trigger. His shield wavered, faltering under the assault.

Brick took advantage of the distraction to lunge at the sheriff, arms outstretched. She swung the muzzle of the pistol toward him and fired, but Brick's shield swallowed the shots.

She spun around, simultaneously reaching for something on her belt. She tossed the object back over her shoulder.

"Grenade!" Brick cried.

Axton scrambled to dive behind the sheriff's desk, but it was too late- the grenade's short fuse depleted. It screeched and blew, blinding Brick temporarily. In the confusion, Nisha slipped out through the doorway.

Brick's shield held, but barely. Pixelated fractals danced before his eyes as its matrix stabilized. When his vision cleared, he saw Axton lying over the desk, blood darkening his jacket. The injured man pushed himself up with a groan.

"You okay?" Brick asked, stumbling over to him.

"I'm fine," Axton barked. "Get after her!"

He fumbled under his shirt again, this time revealing a small case with a red plus symbol on its plastic lid—one of Zed's patch kits—and Brick nodded.

"I'll be back," he promised.

In the dim backroom, Brick's eyes locked onto a rectangle of white light against the back wall: a door, flung wide open. Without hesitation, he plummeted through the exit.

A shot sparked against his energy shield. Before he could get his bearings, he felt the distortion of another impact, a rubbery fluctuation. He spotted Nisha fleeing ahead of him, firing back from the hip.

He drew his own Masher from its holster and shot after her retreating form. Her shield rippled like heat waves off a tarmac.

"Ain't gonna take me down with that little pea shooter," she called back to him.

But she was wrong. Brick could already hear the low-charge blatting from her shield. A bandit leaned out of the shadows, a revolver glinting in his hand, and fired two rounds into the Lawbringer.

"Traitor!" she accused. Another man joined in the mutiny, firing a shotgun at Nisha as she passed. Brick heard him laughing. A third man shot the pistol out of her hand. "Ungrateful bastards!"

None of the bandits followed, though, and soon Brick had chased the Lawbringer to the outskirts of town. Red cliffs stretched high on either side of them, and their shadows raced ahead down the canyon, elongated by the sun setting at their backs. Skag dens winked like empty sockets from the bluffs.

Nisha's shield had been wiped out, but as hard as Brick ran, he couldn't close the gap between them, not even a little. Something that scared the air out of his lungs loomed up ahead.

It was a mine entrance. Just like last time, except this time he might not catch up to her; she might duck down another shaft and escape, taking Brick's chance to question her—_and to get revenge_—with her.

His hand raised independent of his mind, and he pulled the Masher's trigger. One shot punched into the sheriff's side. She staggered on, and he fired again, blowing out her ankle. Now she fell forward, arms flying out to catch herself.

Brick reached her and jabbed a toe into her side. "I got questions."

"About the girls," she guessed, still face down in the dirt.

"No. I'm lookin' for someone who lives here, or used to. Worked for Dahl. Probably a miner, or somethin like that."

"You'll have to narrow it down," she said, and rolled onto her side to look up at him, grimacing and clutching her side. "Everyone here works in the mines."

"This is an old picture, but you can make out her face really good-"

He'd retrieved the photo from his pocket and held it down so Nisha could look at it, but she ripped it out of his grip before he could finish his sentence. She spit a wad of bloody phlegm onto it and let it drop from her fingers.

"Why would I tell you anything?" she asked, her grimace stretching into a grin full of pink, blood-stained teeth.

Brick stomped on her arm without hesitation. It broke with a startlingly loud _crack_. The Lawbringer jolted and screamed, but, to Brick's horror, the scream transformed into a shriek of laughter, then into a choked, gutty chortle.

"Oh, baby," she moaned. "That's...the spot."

"Tell me," he said, feeling outside himself. "Tell me where she is. Her name is Amanda. She's got curly black hair and brown skin, and she'd be thirty, now, and if you don't tell me, I'll break your other arm."

"Go ahead."

Brick slammed a boot into the Sheriff's ribs instead, driving the air from her lungs. She wheezed and licked her lips. A trickle of blood slipped from the corner of her mouth.

"Might as well kill me," she sighed. "I don't-"

She was interrupted by a loud, low chuffing that echoed between the cliffs. The sun slid down the western sky like a runny egg, staining the canyon red and drawing the skags out of their dens. Brick saw their eyes catch the light in the deepening shadows. One, two pairs of red orbs, then more; too many to count. The skags circled at a distance, tasting the air with lashing tongues.

Nisha's eyelids snapped up, revealing wide, wobbling schlera, pupils contracted to tight points. She tried to scramble to her feet despite the hole in her gut and ankle. Pain drove her back down with a thin, plaintive cry.

"I don't know the woman!" she snapped. "Listen. It was a mistake to let me go in the mines. You...you've got to kill me this time."

But Brick had seen her terror, and he wasn't about to make the same mistake as he'd made with Shep. Without a word, he spun on his heel and turned, but Nisha's clawed hand shot out to hook around his ankle.

"The girls! They died, right? You got them killed. I hope it was slow. I hope-"

He shook his foot free and stepped down on her fingers. They snapped like brittle twigs under his boot.

She didn't feign amusement, this time, but yowled, and was answered by a skag's staccato warble. An alpha emerged from its den and shook itself, its armor plates sliding against each other like a tectonic shift. It turned a greedy eye on the pair of humans.

"Goddammit!" Nisha shrieked, spraying a fine mist of blood. "Finish me yourself, you chickenshit bastard! Kill me like I killed your mutt!"

She meant Dusty, but Brick thought automatically of the stray girl—of Kindle—and reached for the chip on his necklace. It fit perfectly into the grooved scar. His animal thrilled through him, but right now, he and his animal were the same; one merciless, bloodless reptile.

Brick took a step back. Another. The skags grew bolder, matching each pace he took with a pace forward. Sunlight fell over their faces as they emerged from the shadows, revealing the drool stringing from their trisected jaws.

Nisha began to weep.

"The farms!" she cried.

Brick blinked. "Huh?"

"The woman...if she's alive...they probably have her in the farms," Nisha panted.

"What farms?" he asked, although he had a suspicion already, one that filled him to the throat with dread.

"Bandit...breeding farms..."

Brick swallowed. For a moment he was pricked by numbness, crawling up his limbs, washing over his chest, locking his neck, loosing his head. Then the feeling broke like a fever, leaving him sweating and shaking and feeling like he was going to puke.

"I'll tell you where. If you'll finish me...I'll tell you."

Brick had holstered his revolver, but now he touched the grip. Nisha understood. Tears welled and spilled over her cheeks.

"The farms," he reminded.

"Right. Under the Bloodshot Stronghold...the dam. You know it? Underneath...there are tunnels..."

Brick knew where she meant. The old Dahl dam out by Sanctuary, or where Sanctuary had been. His hand fell away his gun. The horror that slackened Nisha's face made Brick's broken lip curl into a grin.

"You said-"

"Ain't no fairness in the west, marm," Brick said, turning around again and striding into the setting sun. He quoted the antagonist of that old western, the one he'd heard a thousand times growing up: his baby sister's favorite movie.

"No place for a Lawbringer," he finished.

"Bastard!" the Sheriff yelled after him. "Monster!"

Brick didn't turn to look when her accusations lost their shape and became formless, frantic screams, or when those died away, too, to be replaced by the wet sounds of eating.

Eventually he couldn't hear those, either.

The walk back felt much longer than the sprint into the canyon. By the time the train station loomed into view, the sun had vanished over the toothed rooftops. He tried to keep his thoughts off of Amanda, but it was impossible. Her face loomed into his mind again and again, and with it, the Sheriff's words: Farms. Bandit breeding farms.

Followed inexorably by the nightmarish rumors he'd gleaned from Rocko; Babies growing in tanks, their parts enlarging at different rates, stunted, insane. Women locked away for the purpose of...of...

With every step, Brick and his animal were cleaved further and further apart, made different by the dread which threatened to suffocate him.

Soon he became aware of a sound, a snuffly inhalation, and the barest seismic tremble under his feet. The first tremor was followed by another a few seconds apart, then another- a slow, inaudible drumbeat. The town ahead was dark and still, so the source of the rumbling had to be behind him.

Brick's hand dropped again to his revolver, but this time it closed around the grip. He drew the Masher and whipped around.

But when he saw, the gun dropped from his hand. Brick gaped up at the skag. It gaped back down at him, trisected jaws split like a grin. It was the largest skag Brick had ever seen—even larger than its mother had been.


	11. Two Birds

A tongue as thick as Brick's waist lolled from the skag's mouth. For a moment, Brick considered that he might be as wrong, that this was some other skag who would now ensnare and swallow the idiotic human who let his gun slip through startled fingers—but the tongue didn't ensnare him. It only licked, leaving a slimy trail all the way from Brick's feet to his forehead.

"Frank?" he said, after slinging the goop away from his mouth with one wrist.

The skag answered with a chuff and dropped into play position, forelegs splayed, rear waggling. It was a surreal feeling when Frank gently bumped his head against Brick's chest, like being nudged by a mountain.

"I came back," Brick said against Frank's craggy dome. "I came back for ya, buddy!"

As if to call him on his shit, Frank sighed a doggy huff and sat back on his haunches. Brick hadn't expected to find Frank. In fact, he'd guessed he might have been torn to shreds by the resident pack of skags, but Frank had not only survived: he'd flourished. Now he towered high over Brick, peering down with a glint of scorn in his eye.

"Oh, come on, I had to do it. Roland would'a killed you."

Frank looked away and blew a contemptuous snort through his nostrils.

"Stop bein' a baby," Brick said, and jabbed the hulking skag in the leg. It was like punching a cratered moon. Frank turned his gaze back down at the man clutching his fist and swearing under his breath, and deemed him worthy of another sloppy kiss. Brick wrung a double fistful of slobber out of his shirt.

"There it is! The demon skag-mother!"

Brick looked around to see the source of the voice. It was one of a pack of men: big, dirty hunters with long hair and longer beards, and rifles raised toward Frank.

"Wait up," Brick said, raising a hand. "Ain't no demon, and no mother, neither. This is my dog."

One of the hunters held up a bedraggled flier. "This here bounty says otherwise. Stand aside, friend. We don't want no trouble with you."

"If you're tryin' to kill my dog, you got trouble," Brick said. He popped his neck and cracked each fistful of knuckles with relish.

Frank didn't wait for Brick to defend him. He sprang up, easily clearing Brick's height with one leap, and landed among the pack of hunters. The impact's shockwave sent the men staggering away. They shot at the skag when they recovered their footing, but the bullets glanced harmlessly off Frank's armor.

"Good boy!" Brick cried.

He joined in the fray to haul off a man who'd been about to slap a sticky grenade to Frank's leg, wrenched the grenade from his hand, and stuck it to the hunter's forehead. The man yowled and stumbled off, clawing at the ticking device. Brick lost sight of him through the crowd, but a wet whumph told the rest of the story.

Frank stopped and stood stock still. The hunters took the opportunity to reload their impotent guns, but were interrupted when the skag opened his mouth to belch a beam of blinding white light, turning his head and scattering the hunters who survived the blast.

"Shit," one of the other hunters hollered. "We gotta get outta here! Into the station!"

The others obeyed; they clambered up the stairs, tripping over each other to escape. Frank gave chase, but they ducked into the entrance like rats into burrows, leaving the skag to scrabble at the siding and hook one massive paw through the doorway. He snared a hunter briefly, but the man wriggled out of his grip and scurried back to safely.

"Let em' go. They're not worth it," Brick said.

Frank snarled and rammed his domed head into the building, twice, then took a step back. Brick thought he might be about to give up, but no; Frank gave a mighty leap and landed on the train station's roof, shaking it to its moorings.

He clawed at the roof, sending down a rain of shingles and pylons, until it sagged in on one side. Then he reared up and fell back down to punch through the damaged roof.

Like a dog in a rabbit warren, Frank wreaked havoc on the hunters who'd been foolish enough to pursue his bounty, tossing them left and right out of the roof. Brick flinched aside as a man splat-crunched on the deck next to him.

He caught the eye of the parka wearing stranger from earlier. He was hiding in the shadow of a boulder, and when he saw Brick looking at him, he shrugged and held a finger to his lips. Brick returned the gesture and turned away from the building, starting back to the Sherriff's office. Frank would be fine—he'd more than proved that. Brick had to find Axton.

But Axton found him first. "Hey! Slab King!"

The scruffy, wounded man strode out of the town's shadows, one hand raised in a wave. Brick waved back with an ear to ear grin.

"Hey! Guess what? I did the mission!" Brick said.

"You blew up the station? How...?" Axton stopped, his gaze settling on the destruction of the building over Brick's shoulder.

Brick didn't turn around, but he could hear the whine of metal—probably the train being crushed under Frank's broadsword sized claws—and spread his hands magnanimously.

"That's my dog," he boasted.

"Helluva dog," Axton breathed, eyes bulging with amazement.

"Yep. 's a good thing, too. If those idiots had killed him, I don't think I would'a been strong enough."

"Strong enough...?" the other man muttered, catching up to where Brick stood on the platform.

Now Brick did turn to look at Frank, and admire how he'd flayed the station wide open, revealing the crushed train and the huddled forms of survivors. The skag met his gaze with a grin.

Brick elbowed Axton. When the man looked back at him, he held out his necklace for him to see: the key, but mostly the two paws.

"It'd be _way_ too heavy," Brick said. He whooped a laugh at his own joke and slugged Axton on the shoulder.

* * *

><p>By the time Axton parked the truck in the shade of some bluffs, the horizon had polished off the sun, leaving them in deep darkness. Brick could barely see Axton swing over the side of his truck. He clambered down from his own ride. Frank waited for him to reach the ground before he flopped over, panting.<p>

"Did you have to drive so fast? You wore him out."

"If I drove any slower, he would have caught me," Axton said, emerging from the shadows. He looked pale, and he struck a match with shaking fingers while he talked. In his other hand, he'd retrieved a cigarette, but he looked back and forth between the light and cigarette as if he hadn't expected to see them. He dropped the match and ground it under his boot with a sigh.

"She'll kill me if she smells smoke on my breath," he explained as he pocketed the cigarette.

"You sure she'll let Frank stay?"

"Yeah. Well, probably."

Brick cracked his back and rubbed his sore ass. Frank hadn't been the smoothest ride, but it was worth it. He only wished he could have seen how awesome he looked astride a enormous skag, streaking along after a truck through deepening twilight.

"Frank, stay. We're gonna go first so you don't scare the hell out of anyone," Brick ordered, jabbing for Frank to sit with one finger. The skag, as always, ignored him, and followed the two humans so closely that he was nearly stepping over him.

They picked their way through a perimeter of junk—scraps of cars, ships and other brick-a-brack—stacked so high that Brick couldn't see the building beyond until they reached the end of the garbage maze. Frank spotted a spiderant skittering through the heaps and lunged off after it, sending sheets of metal avalanching in his wake.

"Who's out there?" A voice from the direction of the garage shouted. She sounded a lot like Scooter, which made sense; Axton had told Brick already that the owner of the garage was Scooter's sister.

"McNally, if that's you again, I'm gonna stick this shotgun so far up your—"

"El, it's me!" Axton called, waving to be seen against the night.

A woman emerged from the garage, coverall-clad, and nearly as big around as she was tall. When she saw Axton, the scowl on her face untwisted into a smile, so unspeakably pretty that it made Brick think of the lights beyond the mountains. She greeted Axton with open arms and pressed him to her ample bosom, muffling his childish 'hur hur hur's.

"Ax, you dog. You never visit!"

"Sorry. Been busy waging war against Hyperion, trying to stop Jack from opening the vault, all of that heroic stuff."

"Uh-huh. What's her name?"

"What? No, I, uh..." Axton shrugged. "I brought someone for you to meet."

Brick watched the exchange from a few yards away, grinning absently, and jolted as Ellie turned her gaze on him. She scrutinized him up and down.

"I know I said I wouldn't let you talk me into this again, but...woo-ee," she crowed, and fanned herself with one pudgy hand.

Brick flushed from stem to stern, and Ellie laughed.

"And so shy!"

"No, not him!" Axton squawked. "I mean, you can meet him too. This is Brick. He's a Raider."

Brick held out a hand to Ellie. She took it, but used the grip to pull him into a hug that whoofed the air out of him, then released him with a flourish.

"Nice to meet ya, Brick. I'm Ellie, this here's my garage, and if you need anything, you come to me. Anything for the Raiders."

"Well, since you offered..."

As though summoned by his master's intent, Frank bounded out of the night, dragging most of a junk pile along with him. Ellie drew the shotgun holstered over her back and raised the muzzle to meet the oncoming skag.

"Holy-!"

Brick pushed the barrel of her gun aside just as she pulled the trigger. The shot hit only cracked earth and sprayed clodfuls of dirt. Frank reached them and stopped, tongue lolling amicably.

"This is who I wanted you to meet," Axton said, gesturing up at the hulking skag. "This is Frank, and he needs a place to stay."

"Here? I mean, sure!" Ellie said, striding fearlessly toward the skag now that he'd halted. She circled Frank, looking up at him with undisguised wonder on her face. Frank stared back at her, over one shoulder, then between his legs when she rounded to back, then with his head cocked as she came around to face him again. He lowered his muzzle to her with a low chuff.

"Good girl," she said and patted his bumpy nose.

"Frank ain't a girl," Brick said.

Ellie gave him a quirked eyebrow, half smile of a look. "Nah, 'spose your right about that. Big as she's grown, she's more woman. Honestly, though, how're you surprised by this? She's got girl parts for miles!"

Brick blanched. "I dunno what to look for with skags."

"I guess not," Ellie said, a laugh in her voice.

After they got things squared away with Ellie—apparently there were acres of junkyard beyond the garage, and Frank could stay there indefinitely, eating spiderants and bandit squatters—Brick was faced again with the task of saying goodbye.

"I'll be back," he said solemnly, both large hands pressed to Frank's face. "I promise."

Frank chuffed a bad-smelling belch into Brick's face. He waved it away with a cough.

"Guess I deserved that. I didn't come back before, but this time's different."

"Ready to go?" Axton asked, leaning against the Fast-Travel tower.

Brick wrapped his arms around skag's muzzle and squeezed, then pressed a kiss to her nose. Frank returned it with a slobbery smooch.

Brick slogged across the yard to meet Axton by the Fast-Travel, glistening with moonlit spit. He waved to Ellie and Frank, who watched as his atoms began to loosen with crook necked doggy concern, then remembered the last time, the attack the moon had launched against him while his consciousness was splayed open. He whirled around on Axton, to tell him to stop the travel, but it was too late—they were more negative space than men, now—and in a blink, it was over.

Brick stood in the Sanctuary station, stomach reeling, but otherwise fine. The moon had passed over him tonight. Either because it had lost interest in him for awhile, like it had with Mordecai, or because it was busy, or had limited stamina. Either way, Brick remained firmly footed in reality.

Axton clapped him on the back, grinning. Brick flashed him a weak smile.

"Mission success, huh?" Axton said. "Pretty much."


	12. Fear

The Raider HQ greeted them with the soft blue glow of monitors winking in shadows, pierced by a single lit lamp between the two occupants. Roland and Lilith sat side by side, angled away from each other and poring over separate stacks of paper, but Brick spotted their feet touching under the table. They looked up, wide-eyed, feet scuffing apart as Brick and Axton entered the room.

"How's Mordy?" Brick asked.

"He's doing okay. He's at his apartment now," Lilith said, gnawing the end of her pen, "Nobody ever moved in there after he left. Couldn't get the bird smell out."

"Alone?"

"Nah. Bool's with him."

Brick relaxed. If he'd been worried about Mordecai being sick and without anyone to check in on him, or by fear of the hunting moon, he couldn't say, but his gnawing concern began to unwind with the knowledge that someone looked after him- Even if it was Bool.

"That guy's a weirdo," Brick said.

"Mordecai likes him."

Brick grunted.

"How'd the mission go?" Roland asked. He had waited until Brick got his answer about Mordecai, at least, which must have been hard for him.

"Great," Axton answered quickly. "Went off without a hitch."

Brick shot him a grateful glance. Roland nodded. He looked back down at his papers and seemed to lose his train of thought for a moment, then met Brick's gaze again.

"Did you find her?" he asked.

Brick only stared, puzzled.

"Amanda. Mordecai told me. I hope you don't mind, but..." he trailed off, and Lilith's foot touched his for a reassuring second. "We, uh, hope it went well."

Brick shook his head. "It didn't."

Lil pulled out a nearby chair and beckoned Brick to sit down. After a longing look back at the door, toward where Mordecai waited in his apartment, probably shirtless and prone, sweating out a fever, Brick sighed and trudged into the HQ. He plunked down in the seat.

It took awhile to tell them about what happened after he and Axton were separated, about killing the Lawbringer—leaving out the parts about breaking her arm and fingers, of course, and about the skags—until he got to what Nisha said about Amanda, and the possibility of her being kept in a bandit breeding farm underneath the Bloodshot Stronghold.

"Couldn't be," Roland said. "I was there a couple months back."

"No offense, but I doubt they gave you the tour," Lilith said.

Roland made a noncommittal noise and drummed his fingers on the desk. "It's just that this is kind of hard to swallow. That there's some kind of underground facility where bandits are..." he paused, frowned. "Reproducing."

"It's all I got to go on," Brick said.

Silence settled through the group, and Brick was grateful to them for not asking the obvious question; could not finding Amanda possibly be worse than finding her there? He didn't know the answer to that.

"We'll go as soon as you're ready," Roland said.

"Go? Brick asked.

"To the Stronghold," Roland replied, as if it were obvious. "I'll send reconnaissance tonight, have the scouts back tomorrow, hopefully, and then..." he shrugged. "We'll go whenever you want to."

"Who's we?"

"Me, of course. Lilith. You and Mordecai, if he's feeling better, and maybe a few other Raiders. It depends on what infiltration reports back. Taking out Bad Maw and Mad Mike weakened the Bloodshots, but-"

"You...?" Brick asked, looking between Roland and Lilith. "Even though...even though I-"

He had one arm propped on the desk, and Lilith rested her hand over his. "Duh. We're you're friends, Brick. We'd walk straight into hell for you," Lilith said.

Brick didn't point out that if the rumors were true, walking into hell was basically what they'd be doing. A shudder wracked him, and he tried to draw a shade down around the images of shackled women, of bandit babies growing in tanks, and the queer but not misplaced thought of the bird king's hungry call.

"You'll want to see Mordecai," Roland said with a weak smile. "Go ahead, soldier."

"You don't want me to fill out paperwork?" Brick teased, mirroring that faint smile with one even less convincing.

"Axton's got you covered."

Axton had been half out of his seat and angling toward the stairs, where Gaige's honking snores could be heard all the way from the bunks, but at the mention of his name, he whirled around.

"Huh?"

"I'm joking," Roland said. "You can do the reports tomorrow."

They said their goodbyes and goodnights, and, feeling suddenly too large for the HQ, Brick burst out the door with a relieved gasp. It had been a long time since he'd been to Mordecai's apartment, but his feet remembered the route.

He arrived out of breath and mounted the stairs, listening to the familiar clap of footsteps on the concrete slabs, raised his fist to the door, then remembered that Mordecai was laid up. He tried the knob instead. The door was unlocked, and Brick slipped inside. The lights were out in the living room and kitchen, but a golden glow from the bedroom cast rectangular patch of light across the floor.

Bool emerged from that doorway, startling Brick. Light reflected off the old bandit's cataracts turned his eyes briefly into hooded silver discs, making Brick think, superstitiously, of twin half-moons.

Bool caught sight of Brick and turned to face him, his eyes dulling in the shadows. "You scared the hell outta me, boy, barging in like that."

"Sorry," Brick said. "Is Mordy okay?"

"He's plum tuckered. Still got a nasty fever, but he's sleeping it off. Go on in. I'm going home to get a bit of shut-eye myself."

Bool looked like he needed it. He ran a trembling, arthritic hand through his beard as he hunched past, and Brick remembered again how old the man was. He was usually spry enough to make people forget he was the oldest Raider by almost half.

"It's good to see you, son," Bool said, one hand on the doorknob. "I'm glad you came back."

"Me too," Brick said.

He turned, rounding the corner into the bedroom even before the front door clicked shut. Mordecai slept shirtless, facing the wall and swaddled to the waist in blankets. His shoulders heaved with juddering, asthmatic snores. Brick shook him awake.

"Huh...? Where's Bool?" Mordecai mumbled, blinking bruised eyelids up at Brick.

"He just left."

"Oh. Mm," Mordecai smiled. The bags around his eyes were deep and tinged blue, and sweat stippled his forehead. "I missed you."

Before Brick could say anything, Mordecai continued; "Bool was checking on me. Did you know he used to look after the bandits around Sanctuary? He used to sneak food and medicine out to-"

"Shaddup about Bool, "Brick said, climbing into bed beside his friend. "I don't care about Bool. How're you?"

Mordecai loosed a rusty chuckle. "You were always jealous of him. What, you think I'm into pendulous geezer balls?"

"You're burning up," Brick said, folding Mordecai into his arms. The man's bare skin was hot to the touch. Brick's body was still chilled by the evening air, and Mordecai snuggled against him with a pleased hum.

"Better..." he sighed. His eyes snapped open and locked with Brick's. "Did you bring booze? And your sister, did you find her?"

"No, and no."

He told Mordecai what he'd told the others, but left in the good parts about the bones and blood. Mordecai seemed not to mind: even smiled at Nisha's demise. When he got to the story about finding Frank, Mordecai surprised Brick by grabbing his face between two hot, dry hands and telling him sorry, sorry, a hundred times sorry for not backing him up about Frank. He was stupid. He'd been a bad friend.

Brick dismissed his apologies with kisses.

Mordecai didn't say anything about Amanda. Instead, he untangled from Brick and rattled out a few phlemy coughs.

"Babe, you know I love you, but it's too hot to cuddle."

Brick sat up, perching on the edge of the mattress. A styrofoam cup sat on the table beside the bed. Brick picked it up, peered inside, and found ice cubes half melted in an inch of water. He knocked back a swig and winced—Not water, but vodka.

"Bool hooked me up. Hey, gimme that," Mordecai said.

Brick took another swallow instead, letting the liquor trickle across his tongue and down his throat, but held a lump of ice against the roof of his mouth. Mordecai started to complain, but Brick cut him off by pressing his chilled lips to Mordecai's cracked ones. He pushed the ice cube between their parted lips with his tongue.

Mordecai barked with surprise around the clack of teeth and ice, then received the gift with a grateful, deeper probing. They made out until the ice melted and left only a lingering chill in their mouths.

Brick snuggled back into his spot on the bed, Mordecai into the crook of his arm, tickling the larger man's chest with his sleep-mussed beard. Brick licked his fingers and straightened that splayed tuft of hair back into a point. Mordecai thanked him with a firm kiss pressed into his side, finding a spot that tickled and made Brick squirm.

"I was thinking," Mordecai mumbled against his skin. "Remember all the rules we made, when we first started fooling around?"

Of course Brick remembered. Those maddeningly arbitrary rules had dictated the first two years of his and Mordecai's relationship. He nodded, propped himself up on an elbow, and popped another ice cube into his mouth, working it back and forth.

"No kissing," Mordecai said. "No undressing together. No names during sex."

"What you tryin to say, Mordy? You tellin me to buzz off?" he said, a smile quirking around the corners of his lips. When the ice cube had thoroughly chilled his mouth, he sucked cold spots against Mordecai's neck from ear to collarbone. The skin tightened under his touch, bunching into gooseflesh.

"Oh...that feels good," Mordecai sighed. "I was thinking we need new rules."

"_More_ rules?" Brick asked.

"Different rules. We can probably forget the old ones. I mean, we break them all the time."

That made sense, and Brick liked the idea. But-

_A boy with ears like car doors left open stood alone in a field, looking very young, vulnerable and scared. Only, he wasn't alone. Brick's animal was with him._

Brick shivered and foisted the thought toward his animal, who rolled its eyes and folded the image back into its coils. Emmett's ghost had haunted him for so long. It would probably haunt him for the rest of his life, but right now he had Mordecai, hot and wanting, squirming beneath his lips. Mordecai was alive, and Brick wanted to be with him while he could.

"What do you think?" Mordecai asked. He'd said something else, but Brick had missed it.

"Sorry. What'd you say?"

"I was saying we could change the rule about not kissing into a rule about, you know...not kissing anyone else."

"Like, we'd only kiss each other?"

"Right. Exactly." Nerves and a scratchy throat cramped his voice, making him sound like a boy on the verge of puberty. Brick wanted to come up and kiss those hesitant words from his lips, but instead he pressed the chilly flat of his tongue against Mordecai's nipple, rolling circles around the nub.

"I think..." he murmured. "I think I can do that."

"No sex, either."

"With other people, or with you?"

"Oh, we'll still have sex," Mordecai scoffed. "You're not off the hook that easy."

Brick grunted in response and wriggled down Mordecai's body. His lips barely grazed the skin. His breath was a cold wind blowing down the slopes of his friend's concave stomach, gusting across his navel and tickling the short, dark hairs.

"What else?" Brick asked into the hollow of a hip.

"I want to sleep together."

"You just said that."

"Real sleep. In the same bed."

"Oh," Brick said. Instead of replying right away, he kissed a chill down one of Mordecai's angular hipbones, bunching the sheets as he went. Mordecai's cock was soft in the tangled undergrowth of his pubic hair. It was a mouthful—unlike Brick's, Mordecai's member hung as long limp as it stood erect—and an unfamiliar sensation. Brick had never sucked him to hardness before. It had always been firm by the time he got down there, by the time he touched it, even.

Mordecai's hands jerked out to stop him. Brick rumbled a chuckle around the member and obligingly retreated, pressing a cool line of kisses back up his belly.

"I donno, Mordy. Let's not worry about that stuff right now."

Now Mordecai's hands rested on Brick's shoulders, fingers turned outward into claws. "Why? Why not?"

_Because I can't be trusted. Because I killed the first boy I ever loved, and I can't be sure I won't do the same thing to you._

"You're sick," is what Brick actually said. "I want you to take it easy."

"You had all this stuff with Rocko, right? You called him your boyfriend."

"Come on, Mordy. I don't wanna-"

"Is it because he's cuter than me? Younger? Or do you just like him more?" Brick tried to kiss the questions away, but Mordecai shoved his face aside with a ragged growl. "_Decirlo!_"

"I like you more'n Rocko. I just...can't. You don't know everything."

"About Emmett?"

The last sliver of ice slipped from Brick's lips and slid across Mordecai's side, making him squirm and gasp. The sound was like a wind over a distant mountaintop to Brick's ears.

"Whaddya know about Emmett?" he asked. He tried to remember if he'd told Mordecai anything about him, but he hadn't. He was sure of it.

"Listen, don't freak out. I had another moon dream. I don't know if my fever confused it, or if it was trying to...turn me against you, but it showed me some of your memories."

"No."

"Yeah. But don't worry. I'm not scared," Mordecai said, thumbing the ice into his own mouth and cheeking it from one side to the other. "I know you won't hurt me."

"My animal-"

"Not an animal, or a devil. You've got fugues, Brick. Dissociative episodes. Your animal is just an alternate personality. It's because your folks did a shit job."

"No, no. You don't understand. They tried, but I was-"

"You were a _kid,_" Mordecai spat. He pushed himself upright, blankets pooling in his lap and dreads falling across his face. Brick tried to put a steadying hand on his arm, but Mordecai swatted it away.

"A kid whose mom didn't protect him. Shit, your mom's the one you needed to be protected from! So your brain made up this other person...this animal, devil, whatever, to keep you safe. It makes it so you don't have to remember the things people do to you, and the shit you did to defend yourself. But it's you, Brick. You can learn to control it."

"I can't," Brick argued.

"Would you stop saying that? You could try!"

"I killed him, Mordy."

"Maybe. But maybe you didn't. That blood could have been yours, you know. Your momma really tore you up."

"She was trying to stop me. She..." Brick trailed off. The argument didn't hold as much water as usual. Under the scrutiny of Mordecai's emerald eyes, if seemed downright flimsy. The blood _could _have been Brick's own. But where was Emmett, then? He'd never seen him after that day. Still, Brick only shook his head.

"Would you listen to yourself? You're so gullible!" Mordecai sunk back into mattress, shaking with rage and exertion and fever, and Brick pulled him close. "I can take care of myself," Mordecai repeated. "If you come after me, I'll be alright. Don't worry."

Brick would never stop worrying, not for a single second of his life, but he didn't argue. They laid in silence for awhile, Mordecai plastered against his chest, until Brick retrieved the cup from the nightstand. There were a few slivers of ice still sweating in the bottom. He sloshed them into his mouth and turned to kiss that chill against Mordecai's temple.

"I like the new rules," he said. "No kissing nobody but me. No sneaking outta bed in the night."

Brick would break that second rule very soon, but he didn't know it yet. For now, he held Mordecai like he might never let him go, might never roll out of bed again. Hyperion, the nightmares, the farms...those were stars halfway across the galaxy. Mordecai was his earth.

"You still want to pray?" Mordecai asked. "I know its a couple decades late, but if you still wanna say that prayer for Emmett, you should."

Brick found that he did. He mumbled an inelegant prayer into the crook of Mordecai's neck and dampened the feverish skin with a tumble of tears. Mordecai echoed Brick's amen. It came out slurry, slow, and soon he snored against the underside of Brick's chin—a whistling wheeze of a snore—and the larger man clutched him in an embrace that could only protect him from so much: not from the predator who stalked their minds, and not from himself.


	13. The Shots

The Happy Pig Motel sign marred the skyline with a promise of hospitality that nobody would deliver. Brick, Lilith and Roland set out from that rundown relic with the Bloodshot Stronghold set on their HUDs, their digistructed truck leaving a plume of frost in its wake. Brick perched in the gunner seat, hands twisting in his lap, white-lipped and thoughtful. Lilith stared at him. He pointedly did not meet her gaze.

"Maybe I should call Mordecai and see how he's-" she started.

"No!" Brick cut in, whirling to face her. "He ain't feelin' good. Let him sleep."

Lilith stared him down for a long, tense moment, then looked away, propping her chin in her palm with a huff. Brick guessed that she knew he was lying, but was restrained by what Roland told them before they lit out through the Fast Travel: Brick calls the shots on this one. What he says, goes.

So when Brick slunk out of Mordecai's apartment while the smaller man still slept, exhausted and clammy, but cool-skinned at last, without so much as a goodbye, that was his shot to call. He couldn't keep Mordecai safe on a mission with so many unknown variables. Especially after the barely remembered nightmare that drove him from his own sleep, in which he could only remember the moon's single foreboding line: "See you soon."

Roland cleared his throat. "Axton taught me a new game. Anybody want to play?"

Surprised by the commander's obvious attempt to cut the tension, Brick shrugged. "Sure."

"It's called 'marry, boff, kill'. Someone lists three people, and a different person says-"

"Who they'd marry, kill, and...the other one," Brick said. "I know the game. Dish 'em out."

Roland considered for a beat, then smiled. "Marry, boff, kill: Me, Lilith, and Mordecai."

"That's messed up!"

"So you won't answer?"

"Didn't say that..." Brick grumbled. "Well, I'd marry Mordy."

"Sure. You've gotta make an honest woman out of him," Lilith said.

Brick ignored her. "But then what? Then I hafta screw you, and kill Lil," he said, to Roland.

"Hey!" Lilith said, and leaned over the back of Brick's seat to flick him in the ear.

"See, that's why this one sucks. Fine. Boff Lil, kill Roland."

Now it was Roland's turn to swivel a sour puss toward Brick. "I thought you were gay. You'd still rather do it with Lilith than me?"

Brick scowled. "You want me to sleep with you?"

"No! But it'd be nice to be considered."

"There is is," Lilith said, pointing at something in the distance- the Bloodshot Stronghold.

The dam boiled out of the landscape like the eroded face of a mountain, a stark white slab of shattered concrete reflecting the sun. Twin slivers of smoke rose from either end of its perimeter, and the roofs and electrical poles of a surrounding bandit town peeked over the top of a tall, well-fortified fence.

"How're we gonna get into the slums?" Brick asked.

Roland scratched his chin before replying. "Honestly, that's up to you. I told you the scouts reported seismic activity from underground, so there's definitely something down there. Other than that, though..." he trailed off. "It's like I said. You call the shots."

"Yeah? Well, if you say so," Brick said, and tapped something into his ECHO device. It wasn't a call, but a simple signal, one that had been agreed on earlier that morning. He didn't think he'd be using it so soon.

"What was that?" Roland asked.

They pulled into the shade around the encampment. The barbed wire across the top of the fence gave its shadow a jagged edge, and Brick shivered as they crossed that threshold, his arms prickling as though the shadow was a corporeal mass. The fence was a patchwork of metal siding, layers deep and too tall to scale. A sleeping bandit guarded he single gate.

"If there's anyone to evacuate, we'll need the way clear," Roland whispered.

"Who's there?" called the bandit, blinking awake. He scrambled to his feet, potbelly wobbling, and swung his rifle over his shoulder.

"We're friends of Mad Mike," Brick said.

He stood up as well. His fingers itched for his digistruct module. He'd checked the weapons assigned to the radial pad that morning, and mentally ran through their order: Up for the Masher, down for the Draco. Left to deliver the Mongol, right for his new Hyperion shotgun.

"Doubt it. Mike's still dead."

"Really? Still?" Lilith asked.

The guard missed her sarcasm. His tone was ponderous and solemn when he replied; "Yup. I'm pretty sure." His brow furrowed, and he seemed to consider for a stretch of seconds. "So, either you're real dumb, or you're Raider spies."

"No way!" Brick said. "Those Raiders are snobs. Especially the commander, Roland. I heard he's a real uptight asshole. Right, Jimmy?" Brick cracked a grin down at Roland.

"Uh...yeah. I also heard they recruited the Slab King. Don't know why. He's supposed to be a real piece of work."

"Issat right?" The guard mused, scraggly brows scrunched. "I didn't know-"

"Piece of work, huh?" Brick interrupted, leaning down toward Roland with a smirk twisting his split lip.

"Yeah. Heard he's a pain in the ass to work with, and that he doesn't follow orders."

"Probly 'cos they're stupid orders.

"Uh...I got in trouble last time I let strangers in, so I'm not gunna do it again. Sorry," the guard said, and sunk down to rest on the rusty engine block where he'd been napping.

"That went well. Now what?" Lilith hissed from the backseat.

Before Brick could reply, he caught sight of something on the horizon. It looked like a fogbank rolling toward them, but as it drew closer—amazingly fast—it manifested into a flurry of snow, disturbed by four giant paws. Brick pointed, and Roland and Lilith turned to see.

"What the hell...?" Lilith gasped.

Frank gallumphed toward them, crashing through snowbanks with the jubilant abandon of a pup. A human figure bumped along on her back, barely able to keep a grip on the rollicking beast.

"Ran into an old friend in Lynchwood," Brick explained.

The skag didn't slow, so the three of them sprang from either side the vehicle, out of Frank's path. The bandit guard scurried back to his feet. The stag stopped, barely a foot from the rifle which trembled in his hands. Petrified, the man didn't fire. His breath puffing visibly through his slack-jawed mouth as Frank began to unfurl her jaws.

She snapped. The bandit was cleaved in half.

Ellie waved down at the Vault hunters. "Hey, ya'll! I'm so glad you called," she said.

"Thanks for comin," Brick said. "Sorry we needed you so soon."

"Don't you worry a tick. Me and your girl were just waiting by the ECHO." She slapped Frank's neck, but the skag paid her no mind. She was peering over the wall, quivering with anticipation.

Shouts rose from beyond the fence. Frank lifted one massive paw and brought it down on the barbed wire, crushing it under the calloused pads. The steel crunched like a tin can. Frank's back paws finished what the front started, trodding a wide section of fence flat into the snow.

Brick and the others followed her through the opening. Inside, Roland jabbed in the direction of the gate, and they split off. Bloodshots laid into them from all sides. Brick saw Roland make himself low and strafe into cover, but he didn't do the same. He preferred to shatter skulls with brass-ringed knuckles, which he proceeded to do, swinging left and right through throngs of enemies.

A hoard of psychos piled into the street ahead, so many that they seemed like one beast with a hundred flailing limbs and empty eyes, a sea of living flesh. Brick thumbed right for his shotgun. Pinpoints of light carved the gun out of the air.

The wave of psychos crashed around him. He pulled the trigger, and a burst of flechettes ripped from the muzzle of the gun, pulping the nearest bandits. Gore splashed the others, but they didn't falter. They fell on Brick with clawed hands and gnashing teeth. He shot and shot again, rending head from neck from chest. Mangled bodies heaped around his boots.

Panting, bloody, Brick continued toward the Stronghold entrance. When he stepped around the next corner, the ground before him erupted. Snow sprayed as the street was split by a volley of heavy gunfire.

Brick tracked the bullets to their source. A turret atop a tower had its silver muzzle trained toward him, and he leaped into cover just before another hail of gunfire ripped the ground apart where he'd been standing. The meaty armed bandit manning the turret roared an insult that Brick couldn't make out over the din.

Into the digistruct device, Brick pressed left for the Draco, and woofed as the unexpected weight of a rocket launcher filled his arms. _Shit. Down for the Draco. _Still, he leaned out of cover with the launcher raised and fired at the turret.

He missed. The rocket spun harmlessly through the air and vanished over the rooftops.

The bandit swung the chain gun around toward something else. It was Frank who'd drawn his attention, her head lowered, legs spread to steel herself against the onslaught. Bullets spranged off her armor. A spike snapped off her armor and whistled away, coming to stick in the snow like a blade.

Brick clapped another massive round into the Mongol's chamber. From the corner of his eye, he glimpsed Frank's step toward the turret. At the sight of her raised head and muzzle beginning to split, he shouted a wordless warning. His finger squeezed the trigger. The second shot went wild, too, arcing high over the bandit's head. He swore.

Bullets punched into Frank's yawning muzzle. Brick lunged out of cover, the launcher falling from his grip and crunching uselessly to into the snow. Frank's cry filled the air, a shrill sound remembered by Brick's animal, whose mind bulged up through his.

Before his animal could snuff out his cognizance, the storm of bullets ceased. The bandit in the gunner seat slumped to the side and toppled over the edge of the tower.

Brick rushed to his skag. Frank's jaws closed and opened, drooling blood, but she remained standing. Ellie had been huddled in the shelter of an armor plate, and she emerged to look over the skag's shoulder.

"Good girl," she half sobbed against Frank's bumpy scales.

"You okay, buddy?" Brick asked.

Frank ambled over to where the bandit collapsed, gently gathered him into her mouth, and swallowed him with one vindicated gulp. She looked back at Brick with a satisfied gleam in her eye.

"Guess you're fine."

He scanned the bandit slum, looking for whoever had shot the bandit gunner out of his seat. It could have been Roland or Lilith—he didn't see either of them, though he heard the rattle of skirmishes somewhere else in town—but he guessed it wasn't. After all, Frank had been saved the same way before.

Mordecai dropped down from the building beside Brick. His dreads were haphazardly gathered into a ponytail, his goggles slung around his neck, and his mouth twisted by a scowl.

"Hey, _puto. _Forget something?"

Before Brick could explain, a bandit bellowed from somewhere in the encampment. "SHUT THE GATE!"

Brick heard the answering tick of chains and groan of metal from the Stronghold entrance. Chains as thick as Brick's arms clanked as they worked to haul up the heavy door. Mordecai bolted toward the receding door. Brick followed, and spotted the others making their way through the camp.

Roland arrived at the door first, turned, and laced his fingers. Lilith stepped into his waiting hands without missing a beat. She sprang, easily clearing the height of the door and sliding out of sight. Mordecai went next; he hooked his elbows over the top of the door before dragging himself the rest of the way up.

Brick caught up and managed to grab the door without jumping. He pulled down on it with all his strength. The ticking chains stuttered, and for a second it seemed he would be able to force it back down, but then the inexorable climb of the door resumed, pulling him off his feet. He clambered up, perched on the edge, and reached down as far as he could to Roland.

The commander was just able to grab his outstretched fingers. Brick clung to one chain, boots braced against the door, straining to pull Roland up. Just when he thought he'd have to let go or have his arm crushed in the junction, Roland cleared the top.

They both rolled down the steep slope and into the Bloodshot Stronghold.


	14. Long Slip

The four friends fought their way through the Bloodshot Stronghold, making their way—slowly, over bodies of Bloodshot guards—toward the turbine room. There, the scouts reported they would find a system tunnels that led into some ducts under the dam, and, hopefully, an entrance into whatever secret facility lay beneath.

The Bloodshots didn't make it easy. They sent wave after wave of guards to intercept the intruders, a seemingly limitless amount of men with guns. Rubied to the knees and elbows with blood, Brick slogged on, grim-faced and dead determined.

While he smashed a fist through the face of a marauding psycho, Mordecai called him names, called him a coward and a bastard for slipping out while he slept.

"You were sick," Brick argued.

The Orion cracked, kicked, and a bruiser's skull caved in like the soft side of an apple, his sockets full of sparks.

"I'm feeling fine. You could have asked."

"Did you hear the moon?" Brick whispered. He needed have bothered. Roland and Lilith were half a room away, flanking Roland's turret and standing their ground against a barrage of chain-gun fire.

"See you soon," Mordecai quoted. "That's no excuse. You snuck out of bed this morning like a bad date, and if you think I'm gonna-"

He didn't flinch when Brick's fist hurtled toward him. Brick was aiming for a psycho behind him, whose face folded around his fist with an unpleasant ease, but he thought it was to Mordecai's credit that he hadn't winced away.

"Wasn't tryin to hurt you," Brick grunted.

He turned and hurried after the others, to help with their skirmish, before Mordecai could argue.

Later, in a flooded chamber where concrete formed cross-crossing paths through a swamp of stagnant water, while Roland and Lilith took another route around the room, Mordecai caught Brick's arm. Brick stopped and met his goggled gaze.

"What?"

"I don't need you to protect me."

"You told me that. It ain't gonna stop me, though."

Mordecai cocked his head to look at something around Brick's shoulder, and Brick followed his gaze. Two nomads with slabs of steel for shields had sidled through the doorway.

"I'm a grown man. I can take care of myself. And it's not just this time," Mordecai said, as he drew the pistol from his hip. "It's how you wouldn't tell me about Emmett. And how it took you so long to kiss me."

"Whaddya want me to say?" Brick asked.

"You didn't leave without Roland or Lilith. Why's that? You think they're better than me, because Roland's ex-Lance, and Lil's a siren?"

Brick could barely hear the accusations over the thunk of his flechette gun. He fired shot after shot as he backpedaled away from one of the nomads. The slips of steel stuck into the Bloodshot's shield, more spun away.

"A little help?" he barked.

Mordecai put two shots through the shield's eyeslit and into the bandit's skull. The man dropped. Brick stepped back again to avoid being crushed, as the shield fell forward to clap against the concrete. The body slid over the side of embankment and splashed into the murky water below.

"See? I can hold my own."

"I know," Brick said.

His steps rattled over the shield as he stepped across, toward Roland and Lilith and the other nomad. Caustic rounds from Electra had embedded in the bandit's shield and corroded holes in the metal, which Roland fired through. The Ogre assault rifle blatted in his grip.

"So why'd you ditch me? Just didn't want me around?" Mordecai asked.

Brick whirled around to face him, and again the scrawny sniper refused to flinch. He thrust his necklace out, twisting it to catch the dim sodium light from the doorway. "I love you, okay? An' I don't want nothin of yours on this stupid thing."

Behind him, the gunfire had ceased. Brick heard Lilith 'awwww'. Mordecai conceded with a swallow and a nod, and ushered Brick on, embarrassed.

The next chamber was also half-full of water, swilled by gently rotating turbines. Roland confirmed that this was the place—the junction where the Stronghold met the sewers. Where they'd split into the underbelly.

Bloodshots waited from them, lined up on the ramparts above. They fired on sight, sparking the shields of all four friends before they could scatter into cover. Brick slogged over to a steel tube and ducked inside. His shield blinked with low-charge urgency. Bullets pitted the metal around him, their resounding gongs echoed throughout the tube.

He could barely crouch in the cramped space, much less return fire.

In the circle he could see through the tube's mouth, something splashed into the pool. A grenade winked in the murky water. Brick scrambled backward. He raised his arms to shield his face, but there was no flash, no pain.

Instead, he felt pulled, as if by the gravity of some sudden moon. His arms flung out and gripped the ribbing of metal, bracing himself inside the tube.

The bandits lacked his quick reflexes, it seemed, because they smashed against the unyielding concrete beneath the low rise of water. They were dragged, broken-limbed, into the singularity device. The pulse of light quickened between their bodies.

Brick flinched when the bomb whumped and blew, spraying gore. A bloody tooth shot into the tube, rattled around, and came to rest in one of the metal ridges just in front of his face.

He scrambled out of the tube to rejoin his friends. Roland looked smug. Brick assumed it had been his grenade that caused the damage around them, the tendrils of blood that unfurled across the pool. Brick clapped him on the back.

He didn't wait, but ambled on to the arch between two huge turbines. He passed through with Mordecai hurrying to one side and Roland and Lilith flanking on the other.

Darkness waited for them beyond that curve of concrete, a blackness like a solid wall. Their shield readouts stabbed mere pinpricks of light into its murky hide. Even when Roland flicked the switch on an LED flashlight and swung the beam out ahead of them, it only illuminated a narrow strip of tunnel.

But it was enough to see by as they made their way into the bowels of the Bloodshot Stronghold. Roland would periodically open his holographic HUD device to check the Raider information on the dam. Eventually, he admitted that this was all uncharted territory, and they were on their own.

They seemed to have left the Bloodshots behind. Nobody accosted them while they slogged through ankle deep water, picking turns blindly. They didn't talk. The only sound was the slosh of water around their ankles. The darkness deepened as they went. It seemed to grow a character of its own, a poisonous personality that bullied the flashlight's glow into a narrow dagger.

When Brick began to think the search had gone on too long, that at any moment someone would sensibly suggest that they might have been wrong, that they should cut their losses and return to Sanctuary, they came across a stairwell. It led up to a series of steel ramparts, into another room, and then down—down and down, for ages, it seemed—brightening steadily as they descended, and ended at a single door.

A flickering lamp illuminated the door. A plaque on the wall denoted the room as 'Decontamination' in the austere military font of a DAHL facility.

Brick reached out to grip the hatch-style knob. He hesitated, filled with the surety that this was a point of no return, a funnel into whatever trap the moon had laid for them. His fingers tightened around the handle.

A hand touched the bunched fist by his side, and he jolted. Mordecai slipped his fingers into Brick's briefly, to give his palm a reassuring squeeze. Brick flashed him a smile, just for an instant, then released the other man's hand. He braced his own against he door, turned, and pushed.

Dense darkness filled this chamber, more like a fog than an absence of light. Even the glow from the doorway revealed only the area just inside. Roland took point. His flashlight swept the room, revealing a circular chamber with drains in the floor and knobs on the mildewed walls. They stepped inside, and the door slammed shut behind them.

"Who closed the door?" Roland whispered.

It was Brick who'd entered last, and had accidentally allowed the door to swing shut behind him. He shrugged, hidden by shadows.

"Who-" Roland began to repeat, but stopped. A figure stumbled into the flashlight's beam.

Brick grabbed automatically for Mordecai's arm, to pull him back. The thing—it wasn't a person, couldn't be a person—grazed the ceiling with its hooded head. A coat bulged around its malformed body, ripped in places where limbs thrust through. Its skin sagged in sallow folds.

The pinpoint of light stitched down the creatures body, revealing that two of its limbs appeared to be second and third heads. They snapped and snarled, and twisted from the creature's frame on thick pylons of flesh. They blinked with the sightless eyes of deep sea fish. Their faces were eerily human; one piggy nosed but taut skinned, the other, larger, with straight features and a crop of curly hair.

"I know that face," Roland whispered. "That's Bad Maw. He's a Bloodshot lieutenant."

"Couldn't be. Bad Maw is dead," Lilith replied, a little too loud; one of the faces turned in their direction, attracted by the mention of its name.

The creature craned its shapeless mass of limbs around, so the topmost head faced the intruders. It's empty eyes fixed on Brick. Its mouth fell open, and a sound tumbled out, one that reminded Brick of a child's talking toy left to rot in the rain: a disjointed, inhuman warble.

He recognized this face, too.

"Mad Mike," he said.

"More Mad Mike," Lilith corrected.

The patchwork bandit lunged at them with surprising speed. One slimy arm struck out and connected with the flashlight, sent it spinning away. It cracked against the wall. The light extinguished, plunging them into a void.

Brick felt the beast stagger past, close enough to feel the sick heat radiating from its skin. He jabbed his digistruct pad, and this time, he remembered: _down_.

The Draco appeared in his hands, hailed by phantoms of zigzagging lasers. They flared out and left him with only the dull glow of the elemental cartridge. Staccato bursts from the gun in Lilith's grip filled the room with a strobing red pulse, lighting the room up like the belly of a storm cloud. The Draco's baritone bark answered Pyra's chatter.

Shot after shot struck their target, igniting small flames in its tattered coat, but nothing slowed it. The thing launched itself at Roland and slammed him up against the wall. The commander squirmed in its grasp.

Brick strode up and squeezed a volley of shots into the creature's back. It swung around, smacked him to the floor. His head hit the ground with a crack. Shooting stars filled the space between his eyes.

"Get to the lift!" Roland ordered.

Brick scrambled to his feet, full of sick panic at the thought of the others hurrying into some lift he hadn't seen and taking off without him. The fear was unfounded. On his feet, he felt a touch at his wrist. The touch became a grip, and a flash of purple revealed Mordecai by his side.

The sniper half dragged and half led Brick across the room, toward the lift he hadn't noticed. The metal floor rattled as they stamped inside. Something jangled after them, and Brick threw a protective arm in front of Mordecai, but relaxed when Roland's voice came from close by.

"Is Lilith here?" he asked.

An answering shower of purple sparks left Lilith standing on the lift between them. She lunged forward to slam on a button. The lift lurched, began to rumble downward. By the brief glow of Lilith's phasewalk, Brick saw the creature staggering toward them. They fell away before it could reach the lift.

"What was that thing?" Lilith asked, barely loud enough to be heard over the thing's disappointed howls.

"A guard," Brick guessed.

"It saw me in phasewalk. It looked right at me."

She shuddered, and Brick noticed the runes on her arm and hip glowing with a faint purple light, the same way they had in the mine shaft where he'd first hunted down the Lawbringer. Besides that faint shine and the light of their shields, they descended through the dark.

The lift stopped with a thump. The darkness outside the lift was so complete that Brick wondered if they'd reached the bottom, or if the beast above had snared the cables and held them between floors.

One of the friends must have dared to breathe, to shift, because the first overhead fixtures buzzed on, triggered by a motion sensor. More followed down the corridor ahead. Half the bulbs had burned out, and the others flickered, their plastic casings splotched by grime and full of dead bugs.

The wash of light revealed the nature of the chamber. Brick stepped back. He stumbled into Mordecai, who caught his arm with reassuring strength.

Brick recognized the place. It looked different than the painting, but the distant warble of the mutant might have been the bird king's wickering, and there was the smell: a putrid, soul guts smell. Brick understood that he'd slipped—that long, subterranean slip he'd always feared—and, finally, emerged into Hell.


	15. Pit

Dark purple luminescence throbbed through the chamber. It filled the glass tubes that lined the walkway on either side, illuminating the shapes suspended within. The figures—human figures, Brick thought, although some had mutated far past recognition—were hooked by nose and mouth to clear tubes that ran up through the tops of the tanks.

Some of the tubes had shattered, leaving halos of crunched glass lay around their bases. Roland walked down the path like a man dreaming, and Lilith followed. Mordecai pulled Brick along by the hand.

"Is this were they...grow them?" Lilith wondered aloud.

Brick looked at the things in the tanks as they passed. Some had outgrown their berths, so their swollen limbs smashed against the glass. Others moldered from within. One tank had a long crack running up one side, so the fluid drained out, leaving a mummified corpse in the bottom. Its eyeballs were too large behind thin lids. Its hands rested serenely in its lap.

"Don't look," Mordecai ordered, but Brick was helpless to stop himself.

They passed a tube where a nearly intact man floated. His abdomen had been split, and a pale glut of intestine bulged from his side. It reminded Brick of a boiling egg: the way whites escape through a crack and congeal in the water.

He managed to stagger a few more steps before retching. Bile splashed his boots, and Mordecai jerked away but didn't break the lock of their hands.

There were other rows of tubes beyond the first, so many that Brick couldn't see the far wall. Pulpy mounds webbed some of the tanks together. Varkids darted in and out of those mounds, their hives, with their wings making a soft shirring sound. Coils of tubing heaped around the rows, hooked to blinking readouts at the base of each tube.

The vault hunters continued down the hall in reverent silence, the silence of passing through a graveyard. The only sounds were the thrum of machinery and the scuff of their feet against the filthy tile floor. Some of the figures seemed to follow their progress with bulging eyes, most glazed milky white, but a few still had irises, pupils. Their bodies whole and undamaged.

The hall dimmed as they went on. It might have been his imagination, but Brick thought he glimpsed a large, dark shape lurking behind the rows. Before he could draw anyone's attention to it, it was gone.

"What was that?" Mordecai said.

"What?" Roland asked. Lilith grabbed his arm and held a finger to his lips to shush him.

Brick followed Mordecai's gaze. The thing he'd thought he saw before, a slinking, skulking shape with an elongated neck, turned a moon eye back on them. Goosebumps prickled Brick's neck. He tightened his grip on Mordecai.

"There's a door ahead. Just go," Roland whispered.

They hurried, faster and faster, until the tanks became a deep purple blur in their peripheral vision. Brick's heart whumphed in time with their eerie pulsing. Though he didn't see it, he knew the thing behind the tanks pursued them. He felt the weight of its beastly attention, so much like his own animal's.

The door at the end of the hall was mercifully unlocked, and they slammed through it, spilled into the corridor beyond. Brick swung the door shut with a bang that echoed down the hall. He leaned against it, chest heaving.

Another varkid infested hallway stretched before them. No tanks in this one, just walls and floor and ceiling that had once been white but had turned grimy with neglect.

"I wonder if they're still doing experiments down here," Roland said.

"Some of those things were alive," Mordecai said. "And I think there was eridium in those tubes. Or they're being pumped with it, I don't know, but.." He gestured to Lilith.

She held out her arm to show off the glowing coils of her siren marks. They stood out starkly in the dim corridor.

"They react to eridium," she explained.

"Might be slag," Roland guessed. "Like in the Hyperion labs."

"You think Hyperion did this?"

Roland shook his head. "I don't know. This is all...I didn't expect any of this."

A varkid scurried over to investigate the puke on Brick's boots, and he kicked it away with a grimace. A distant noise came from the other end of the hall, beyond another door. A man's voice, muffled, followed by an answering one.

"Shit," Roland lamented. "There's another way out. Should we...?"

Brick waited for someone to reply, then realized that Roland had been talking to him. He looked around. There were two doors set into either side of the hall. Whatever they did, they had to act quickly; the voices behind the door were growing louder.

Brick tried the left door at random. It was locked, so he turned across the hall to try the other. It swung open on rusty hinges, and the four friends ducked inside. The door clicked shut behind them just as another squawked open in the hall. Darkness enfolded them, complete but for the faint glowing runes on Lilith's arm.

"I heard something. I swear I did," one of the voices said, still muffled, but near enough to make out the words.

"You always say that."

"And I've always been right. Well, most of the time."

"Oh, please. Name a single-"

A crash cut off the rest of the sentence. Yelling followed, and a rattle: the sound of a locked door shaken on its hinges. The yells turned into screams and the screams into gurgles, and Brick reached out in the dark, to grab and hold Mordecai and Lilith.

Silence. Then a sound, barely perceptible. A kind of wet slithering.

"We should look for another exit," Lilith whispered.

Before any of them could answer her, the thing in the hall replied with a throaty warble. That sound had reminded Brick of a broken toy from the monstrosity upstairs, and now he understood why; there was too much enunciation for a simple animal's call. The creature was trying to form syllables, fragments of words, but they came out choppy from its malformed mouth, made into nonsense by its inhuman brain.

"Wh-wh-wharr...hu-hu-hear...t-t. Tu-tu-tar," it called.

There came a thumping from the hall and a softer patter of footsteps. Brick staggered back. He lost the others in the dark, but they came clutching for him just after. A bang made him jolt. By the bare light of Lilith's tattoo, Brick saw the door dent inward, saw the metal bulge toward them.

"Run," Roland ordered.

They sprinted blindly down the corridor, chased by the gonging against the door as the creature slammed into it over and over. Brick kept Lilith's marks in sight.

Roland hit the end first, sounding impact with an oomph. The others piled against him and were wedged for an excruciatingly long moment, listening the a clap from behind them—the door, Brick thought, knocked off its hinges—while Roland felt for a way out.

Light exploded down the tunnel. Lilith stood between Brick and Mordeaci. Pyra roared in her grip. Flames gusted from the barrel, engulfing the creatures face. It opened its jaws by firelight, revealing human teeth, canines and molars, but too many of them, multiple rows. The SMG did nothing to slow it, only illuminated its approach.

Brick heard the a clunk, the release of mechanisms. Heard the creature's hideous chuckle.

The door swung out and the vault hunters tumbled through. Brick slammed it shut behind them. He tensed, waiting for the second slam—the creature into the other side of the door—but it never came.

"Dead-end," Roland said.

Brick whipped around. Roland was right. They found themselves in a small, square chamber, startlingly well-lit and clean after the spaces they'd passed through. Speakers and cameras had been mounted in each corner. Brick, still leaning against the door, stared up into the nearest. He wondered if anyone stared back.

A mirror covered most of one wall. The vault hunters' reflections watched themselves with wide-eyed exhaustion. Brick found himself in the grips, suddenly, of a crushing guilt, shame over dragging his friends into this nightmare. He barely recognized their faces in the mirror. They'd become animals in the burrow of a predator, hunted by a beast with too many teeth, a beast which tracked them with a thousand glassy eyes.

"Do you guys hear that?" Lilith asked.

Mordecai nodded. "The mutant stopped."

"No. That's weird too, but...that hissing sound. Do you hear that?"

Brick did hear it, now: a sound like an impossibly long exhale.

The figures in the mirror blinked at themselves, slowly, like the placating wink of a cat. Brick raised a hand toward Mordecai to wipe a smudge off of his cheek. His arm sluggishly obeyed the order. In slow motion, Brick found himself too exhausted to complete the gesture. He rested his arm over Mordecai's shoulder. The man crumpled under his touch, and Brick sank with him.

"Gas," he whispered. Mordecai's face contorted into a comically overdrawn look of confusion, but Brick was too tired to explain.

Roland didn't sink slowly, like the others, but fell as stiff as a board onto Brick's belly. The impact drove the air out of him. It woke him up. He struggled under Roland's weight, but he was too weak. The others had become limp heaps on the floor.

_ Gas_, Brick thought, his eyes fixed on Mordecai's slack face. He felt himself swimming out on the same tide that had taken his friends. _The last thing I said to him was 'gas'._

The door made a muffled and distant squall. Brick rolled onto his back and watched the ceiling darken with a dreamy detachment. Just before his eyes closed, a figure loomed over him. He recognized it. He knew its bristling beard and bushy brows, and the glazed eyes that looked stared down at him with a watery gleam of amusement. Then fingers of darkness laced around him, and he knew nothing else.


	16. Needing, Getting

Brick woke to a world of endless blue skies, looking over a landscape that couldn't be on Pandora, couldn't even be real. He stood up to his knees in water. The once-lush grasses had withered and dried to yellow husks, and animal corpses dotted the landscapes. A shifting ceiling of crows had replaced the starlings. As Brick watched, a pillar of feathery black bodies descended from the flock and touched down on one of the animals.

He looked away. When he saw the other thing, the thing in the water, a thin shriek escaped his lips. He wanted to look back at the birds, but he was again mesmerized.

The biomass from that ancient dream was still there, but crows feasted on its flesh. Some of them heard Brick scream. They stopped to look at him, and their features were not crow-like, but human. They grinned with bloody lips. "Eat," they cawed. "Eat!"

"Stop it!" Brick cried. He lunged forward with his arms out, waving to scare off the man-faced birds. "It's still alive! Don't you feel it moving?"

The nearest crows burst into flight before Brick could reach them. As quickly as they departed, three more settled, and they bowed their heads to nuzzle the exposed flesh. Brick cursed and slogged forward to shoo them, but, like the others, they flapped away before his swinging fists could connect. He waded back and forth, scaring up birds only for more take their places.

They picked the mass away one mouthful at a time. Its blood steeped the water red, and Brick wept with frustration. Soon, the mass was completely replaced by a heap of stinking, shuffling feathers.

The birds alighted all at once. They spun upward, wings outstretched, and screamed their condolences to the man left sobbing in their wake.

_Wait,_ said a voice. It was the moon, winking at Brick from behind the veil of birds. _Watch._

Something ruffled the surface of the lake. Tendons like thresher tentacles burst from the water, stretched out and snapped back, coiling together. Between them, pustules bulged and split into boils. Webbed veins popped the surface. A shock of purple light pulsed from its core, and the veins began to throb. It looked nearly identical to the devoured mass, but something was wrong with it. Tendrils of rot crept out from its purple core. The flesh mottled to umber and black, becoming sunken in patches. It stank like old meat.

Brick stumbled away and splashed into the water on his butt, hands coming up to cover his nose. The mass was still growing. He scrambled backward, but not fast enough. Fleshy tubes snared his legs while a wave of meat boiled toward him. It spilled around him in a shockingly cold embrace.

He tried to scream as the mass rose past his shoulders, past his chin, clammy flesh tightening around his throat, suffocating him. Just as darkness threatened to blot out his consciousness, a flash of light sent the mass into a quivering fit. It receded from Brick like a tide.

Blinded by the light, Brick squinted until it dimmed enough to make out his surroundings. The biomasses were gone, both the living and the dead. A mountain range banded the horizon. The merciful light streamed out from behind those dark, hulking shapes, penetrating the thickness of crows that crowded out the sky.

A figure with eyes like twin suns waded toward him. Brick didn't recognize her at first. She'd aged since he'd last seen her, grown taller and fuller, and her hair was shorn nearly as short as his own. She reached a hand down to help him up, and suddenly he knew.

"Your hair," he croaked. He took her hand and staggered to his feet.

Amanda laughed. "I know. It was too big for the helmet, so I had to shave it. Poor baby hated it. It made her cry harder than she's cried since she was in diapers. I felt like such a bitch."

Brick wanted to ask who had cried so hard, but then Amanda did something that mystified him. She reached up to ruffle her head with both hands, and when she moved them away, a tangle of curls fell through her fingers, cascading over her shoulders to frame her beaming face. She huffed a stray curl out of her eyes.

He stumbled forward to throw his arms around her, burying his face in that sudden thicket of hair. His sister hugged him back, just for a moment, then broke the embrace.

"Where are you?" he asked.

The smile remained on her lips, but sunspots bloomed in her eyes. "There's no time. I'm sorry."

"Just tell me where you are, and I'll getchu out," he insisted. "I'll getchu home."

"You know where I am, Brick."

"What're you talkin about? I don't-"

Amanda shushed him by placing a palm over his mouth. With her other hand, she lifted her necklace up over her head. Silver rays beyond the mountain struck the metal and turned it, briefly, into a key forged from light. She placed it in Brick's palm and, like she did once before, took his hand in both of hers to fold his fingers around the key.

"Go down to the cellar."

Brick shook his head and opened his mouth to argue, but she shushed him again with a finger held to her lips.

"He went home. Okay? So don't cry," she said.

Brick hadn't realized he was crying. He reached up and wiped his eyes with his wrist. "I'll save you," he promised.

"It's time to go."

"Wait! Tell me how to find you," Brick begged. His hand darted out to grab to her wrist. He held her tight, but it didn't matter, because already he could feel himself slipping. The colors rushed out of the world, leaving only the gold in his sister's eyes.

"Wake up, now," Amanda whispered. Moon-shadows darkened her gaze. As those twin suns were eclipsed, the dreamscape faded as well. "Wake up..."


	17. Dig

The sound of chewing welcomed Brick back into the waking world.

"Wake up, Jacob," said a voice. "Peas in the pot-"

"Hoe-cakes a'bakin'..." Brick rasped. He forced his aching eyelids open.

Bool greeted him with a grin. "Good, good. I was worried the jump had killed ya." Killed, like kilt. He punctuated the statement by bringing an apple up to his lips and taking another sloppy bite. Bits stuck in his beard while he champed the mouthful.

"Worried about your health?" Brick asked. When Bool only glared at him, glassy eyes narrowed to suspicious slits, he clarified. "Cos you were smokin a pipe last time."

A laugh exploded from the ex-bandit's mouth, a guffaw that seemed to tear out of the man, uncontrollable in its sudden, mad intensity. Flecks of apple sprayed from his mouth. Brick winced and waited for the laughter to subside.

"You always were funny. Always liked you more'n that suck-up boyfriend of yours," Bool said, wiping spittle from his lips. "When I found you in the dirt, bleeding like a hog with a slit throat, I recognized something about you. And when I took a peek at the curve, well..."

"It was you. The moon," Brick said. He groaned and pushed himself into an upright sit.

Bool winked. "I saw the thing inside you, boy. That same mottled madness runs through us both."

He meant Brick's animal. It fluttered at the mention, and Brick swallowed it back. He looked down at the spade, spattered by long-dried muck, laying across floorboards by his feet. Bool followed his gaze.

"Right. We should get to work."

The ex-bandit climbed to his feet and reached down to help Brick up. For the first time, Brick realized that he held something in clutched in closed fingers. He uncurled his fist and found the cellar key lying in on his palm. He reached to check his necklace and found it intact, found both paws and his own key, which meant...

"Amanda's key," he said.

"A good faith offering," Bool explained. "To show you that we're on the same side. It might not seem like it now, but after-"

"How'd you get this?" As far as Brick knew, the last people to have the key were the Hyperion guards, having taken it from Kindle after the attack on New Haven.

"It's not what yer thinking, I ain't one of them cocksuckers. I slipped in and stole they key. Don't look so shocked, boy. You're not so dense as to miss the truth when its looking you down the barrel. Am I right?"

"Your fugues," Brick said, closing his fist around the key and tucking it into his pocket. "When you go, you really go."

Bool touched his finger to his own nose. "Right again."

"That's how you got away from the Lance. And..."

It wasn't that Brick hadn't noticed where they were, but that he couldn't wrap his mind around the impossibility staring him in the face. The fastest interstellar ships took weeks to close the the distance between Pandora and Menoetius, and affordable flights took longer. It was impossible, ridiculous, but somehow they were chatting in the kitchen where Brick had grown up.

They stood on the floor where Amanda had taken her first stumbling steps, tottering toward her big brother's outstretched arms, already restless at nine months old. Brick had tracked Priscilla's blood across those same boards six years later, and, a decade after that, had laid his momma's nose flat against her cheek, striking her in cognizance for the first time- Payback for the slap she'd given Amanda.

Brick's mouth worked, but nothing came out.

"No tricks," Bool said. "It's the real deal. Big jump, though. Plumb took it outta me." He grunted as he bent to pick up the spade, then thrust the handle into Brick's free hand. "That's why you'll do the digging."

"My own grave?" Brick guessed, as he followed Bool out a backdoor. It seemed narrower than the last time he passed through it. He expected Bool to laugh again, but the old Raider just shook his head.

"Not yours," he said.

The hairs on the back of Brick's neck prickled. "Who's?"

"Well," Bool said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "I never tried it on a dog, but I suppose it'll go about the same. I was gon' to do it with just the paw, but it takes a little more, you understand. Bones and sich."

Brick stopped. The field rippled around his knees, gusted by a cool wind down from the mountains. Somewhere ahead, hidden in the grass, stood Pris's grave, marked by a cross that Brick had cobbled together out of two planks.

"Come on, boy, before it gets dark. Don't you want your dog?"

"Take us back to the lab. I want to see my friends."

"Ah. I was hopin' to make this easy, but if you're-"

Brick struck, caught Bool by the collar of his shirt and jerked him half off his feet, dragging him closer. "Take. Me. Back."

"Ah, ah, donchu hurt me, now. How long do you think your Raiders will last down there? Long enough for you to catch a shuttle back? I don't reckon so."

Brick held him for another moment, then cast him away in disgust.

"Whaddya want from me?" he asked.

"I was gon' to tell you while we dig up your dog."

Brick's lip curled. "Nobody's diggin' up Pris. Just tell me." He thought of something, hesitated. "Where are my parents? You didn't-"

Bool waved dismissively. "I didn't see your folks. And, have it your way. Let me..."

He dropped the half eaten apple into the dirt and reached out to Brick, gnarled fingers splayed. Brick grimaced away.

"It's easier with contact."

"I don't care."

With a hard snort blown through his nostrils, Bool resigned, slouching back against the rusted frame of a tractor. Brick suddenly remembered the shovel in his hand. A wild impulse came over him, to swing the spade and cave in the side of Bool's skull. He could dig a shallow hole here in the field and kick the ex-bandit's body into it, go back into the house, wait for his parents...

Bool's lips peeled back into a humorless grin. Brick saw a bit of apple peel stuck between two yellowed teeth.

"We been over this, boy. Hear me out, and you'll see your friends again."

"Start talkin," Brick sighed, and leaned against the tractor beside Bool. The bandit's arm shot out before Brick could stop him, and closed his skeletal fingers around Bricks hand. He tried to jerk out of the icy grip, but suddenly he was transported again, and Bool's touch vanished.

A void of darkness swam up around him.

"Darker'n the inside of a skag," Bool said. "The lights went out for a beat when it happened."

Buzzing hailed the return of light, the flicker of bare bulbs ticking on over head, illuminating the length of the tunnel. Brick stood in a mine shaft. The way behind him was blocked, jammed up tight by broken beams and crumbled earth. The other way stretched on until the way disappeared beyond a curve.

Someone groaned by his feet. Brick staggered back, startled. A man had been caught in the cave-in, skewered through the chest by a snapped beam. He looked vaguely familiar, but Brick couldn't place him.

"Help," he begged around a mouthful of blood.

"Poor sod," said Bool's omnipresent voice. "Never was viable, neither. Listen. Brick. These were my boys. They was a mostly a lot of assholes, like your Slabs, but I was their foreman, and it was my job to keep 'em safe. I failed."

The curve spun. Time slipped by faster, giving Brick a wave of dimensional vertigo, then slowed to a standstill. The trapped man was dead, had been dead for awhile.

Brick shuddered. He turned down the tunnel, following it around the bend.

"I'm older'n dirt, and only getting older," Bool said, rumbling the mine shaft with a chuckle. "I won't be around forever. Someone's got to take care of my boys when I go."

Brick found the rest of Bool's boys, now, reclined against the walls of the tunnel. Their skin stretched taut over gaunt, stubbly cheeks, their eyes closed, too large in their sockets. Some of bulbs strung along the tunnel had burned out, but Brick saw everything by pulsing purple glow of Eridium.

"That shit's poison. We didn't know back then, but we mighta guessed, since we started with birds. Them bird's that are meant to tell miners if there's gas, only they all died right out."

One of the miners sprang up on legs as skinny as a foal's. "Do you see that?" he asked, pointing a trembling finger at Brick. "What is that?"

The other men lolled their heads to look. One sat up straighter and leaned forward, squinting eyes that were already beginning to glass over with cataracts.

"Bool?" Brick said.

"He won't hear you. I don't know how Billy saw you, how he asked you to help him, but you ain't really here."

"He sees me, though," Brick gestured to the pointing man, who stumbled back.

"I do!" the man shrieked. "I see you, ghost! S-stay away!"

"So you were the ghost," Bool said- not the younger Bool who studied the area where Brick stood with an unfixed gaze, but the omnipresent voice in Brick's head. "I remember that. I saw you, too. Just a little, like light cetchin' in the rim of a glass. Maybe that's why I knew you in the Commons. Funny how these things go."

"Why are we here?" Brick asked.

Bool ignored him. "Something happened to us. The eridium killed a few boys outright, like the birds, but folks like Kenny and me, it changed us. We starved down there for days, weeks, nothin' to do but huddle in clothes too big for our skinny bones and wait to die. While I was waiting, I got to thinking about the Dahl officer in charge of our crew. I could see him clear as day—clean face, combed hair—probably sitting at home and sipping a brandy, giving us no mind."

Brick saw him, too, a perfect picture of a well-kept man with a red nose and portly belly, only he wasn't sipping a brandy. The officer used a knife and fork to carefully cleave a piece of steak from the bone.

"So while I was feeling sorry for myself, I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, there he was, sitting down to supper with his kin. You shoulda seen him, son. Eyes like baseballs."

Time skipped again. Now Brick saw a dozen filthy miners hunched around a nicely laid table. They shoveled food into their mouths with single-minded purpose, ignoring the mystified looks of the man and woman and two children who watched from the doorway. The woman ducked into the kitchen and returned with a tray of steaming rolls, which she placed on the table. The men set on the bread like a flock of crows.

"You phased them," Brick said.

"It weren't hard that first time. With so much eridium in my veins, I practically tripped over the curve. It works like a door. Once its open, it ain't much harder for twelve to go as one."

For a second, Brick stood back in the field, looking out over his childhood home and the distant mountains. Then he was swept away again.

Tubes swelled up around him, the same ones that he'd passed in the laboratory, but the shapes inside these were uniformly human. The tap of booted footsteps came from behind Brick, and he spun around to see two figures. They passed through him like ghosts, leaving his skin rippled by gooseflesh.

"You'll manage the same team down here, but it's easy work," said the shorter of the men. "You'll just be labeling and packaging specimens for shipment."

Brick recognized the other figure as Bool's younger self. It wasn't him who spoke next, but the present-day Bool.

"Dahl was trying to create super soldiers. Clones. They-"

"Clones?" Brick repeated. The other Bool swung around at the sound of his voice, eyes darting, searching. The scientist tried to follow his gaze. Brick ignored them. "Clones? But, the farms-"

"Quiet, boy, listen. I got friendly with some of the scientists before Dahl pulled out. They went with no warning, just sealed up the exits with us still down here. We were evidence, so they turned this place into our tomb. I pulled the same trick twice, and phased everyone out, with one condition."

Brick looked at the tanks around him, at the human shapes suspended within. "You wanted your boys back."

"We-ell. Ain't you a quick study," Bool said. "I had the scientists bring back them who died in the mine. To keep an eye on them Lance, I joined up. Figured I'd keep em from killing a few of my boys again. See, they all joined bandit clans on the surface, Bloodshots, a couple more. I tried to keep them safe and bring 'em back when they died. It's a tough row to hoe, bandit livin'. Well, you would know, wouldn't ya?"

He didn't wait for a response before changing the world again. Brick was sent spinning into a void, where he only caught flashes of a scene bellowed through disembodied rage. A man in a lab coat stumbled back against a wall.

"We have to stop," the man said. "The tissue is less viable each time. These things, these monsters, they're not the men you knew. Please, listen-"

There was an impression of blood. A thump.

Bool sighed. "You saw the state of the lab. I ain't proud, but I ain't no scientist, neither. Just a man with responsibilities. I'll keep trying as long as I draw breath. And when I don't, well...That's where you come in."

"You gotta let them go, Bool. Your boys are dead," Brick said.

In the darkness, something snagged his necklace. The bite of the chain against his skin dragged him back to his physical body, and he found himself standing beside the tractor. Bool had the necklace tangled around his fingers. He brandished it with a snarl.

"You wouldn't say the same if it were your Raiders, I bet, or your dogs or sister or that girl. And what about Mordecai, eh? Would you let him rot?"

"I want to see them," Brick spat, yanking his necklace out of Bool's grip. "Show me that my friends are okay, and I'll, uh...I'll think about it."

A look of confusion crossed Bool's features, cut by a calculated quality that Brick recognized. Cash had worn the same expression when he'd gone back on their deal.

"I think I mighta given you the wrong idea. You'll see them again, but the process takes a few weeks."

"The process," Brick echoed, numbness creeping through his limbs, making him feel heavy and detached at the same time.

"All my eggs are in your basket, son. I cain't afford to take no risks. But, don't fuss none. Your friends'll grow back."


	18. Gone Home

"You're lying," Brick snarled.

He lunged for Bool but caught nothing but air. The old bandit had vanished, strafing across the curve. A snap of panic thrilled through Brick, the fear that Bool had phased back to the lab without him. He whirled around, searching, and found Bool standing in the field behind him a dozen yards away. He lurched toward him again.

"Something would have done them in sooner or later," Bool called. "You can't save everyone. Hyperion would have got 'em, or a pack of skags-"

Brick stumbled through the space where Bool had been standing.

"Listen, boy, listen to me."

"I'm done listenin to you!"

Agony lanced through Brick's head, bent him double and drove the air from his lungs. He collapsed to his knees. When he was able to look up, his eyes met with a shimmering horizon and a field that rocked like a sea. A young girl stood in the grass, shivering with the rest of the world. Her hair was a plume of smoke rising from a heat-haze of fire. She reached out to Brick with one pale-palmed hand.

"Get outta my head," Brick moaned, staggering to his feet.

He turned and nearly pitched over again as the world reeled away too fast. His gaze settled on more phantoms: Pris bounding through the grass, Dusty snapping at her heels.

"They're not real," Brick said. The ghosts turned pale and vanished.

"They can be," Bool said. "Ain't that what you want? Don't you care about them no more?"

That sent Brick's animal into a sickening slide upward, a break toward freedom that he barely managed to prevent. The effort drove him back to his knees.

"Aint you tired of killing the folks you love?"

"I didn't...I don't..."

When Brick looked up again, the dogs had been replaced by a new ghost. Emmett grinned back at him with that familiar expression, that look of having just told a joke or getting ready to. This trick was realer than real, and Brick nearly forgot himself in those laughing eyes.

Before he could make a fool of himself by grovelling at the feet of a ghost, twin suns rose over the distant peaks. They flared out an instant later and seared bright spots onto the backs of Brick's eyelids.

They left him with a reminder: The cellar.

"Bool," Brick called. "You still want me to take over the lab? I'll do it."

Suddenly, Bool was standing over Brick, one arm extended down to him. Brick took it, and Bool hauled him up, clapped Brick's hand between both of his own and shook it with a grin.

"I knew you'd come around, son. I saw it on the curve."

"I need somethin first."

Bool gave a solemn nod. "'course. Saw that, too. You want to un-murder the boy."

After a hesitation, Brick returned the nod. He focused on not thinking about the dream, about Amanda telling him to do down to the cellar. Bool regarded him for a suspicious second, long enough to make Brick sweat, then retrieved the shovel from where it was propped against the tractor. He tossed it one-handed to Brick.

The sun—the real sun, not the ghosts of Amanda's eyes that continued to haunt Brick's vision—dipped over the western end of the farmhouse, and the two men followed it past the back porch. Their path took them by the small, square patch of garden that, for years, Brick had been too afraid to weed, because he would have to look at the cellar. The once tidy rows had become shaggy with undergrowth and the vegetables strangled by weeds, as if nobody had taken over the chore when he abandoned it two decades ago.

That dead hour had settled over that farm, that bugless, birdless span of silence. The sun sinking over the mountains cast everything in a nostalgic haze, like a sepia photograph with the details blurred by years. When the cellar rose into view beyond the garden, Brick's strides slowed. He felt like a child again, paraded out by his momma and too afraid to fight her, even though he'd been scared shitless by where they were headed. But his momma wasn't around to slam the door on him this time- Only Bool, who looked over his shoulder now with an eye like a polished glass knob, glittering at Brick from under a hooked brow.

"Come on, son,"he prompted. "You move so slow, dead flies wouldn't fall off ya. You want your boy back or not?"

They stopped at the scabby cellar door, and for a moment Brick paused, despite Bool's urging. The crickets, still a few minutes away from beginning their nightly rounds, waited with bated breath. A padlock shackled the cellar's iron handles together.

Brick grabbed the key on his necklace, but stopped short of lifting it over his head. His key wouldn't work. He'd never expected to come back here, had been explicitly forbidden by his momma, and had never dreamed of unlocking the cellar even if he did. At some point over the years, one of the key's prongs had snapped off. He let the key fall back against his chest and reached into his pocket for Amanda's key, instead: the one she'd given him in the dream. Bool caught that thought. Brick could feel it, a vibration in his skull.

"You tryin to pull something, boy?" he asked.

"You got no reason to worry. If I hurt you, that's like rippin' up my return ticket, right?"

Bool grunted. Brick pushed open the cellar doors with shaking hands, and they swung inward, breathing a waft of cool, faintly earthy smelling air into his face. It was almost pleasant, nothing like the rancid odor he remembered. He was surprised to find the pit from his nightmares transformed, suddenly and completely, into an ordinary cellar.

The yammering of his heart slowed as he descended the stairs. The old boards creaked under his boots. Sunlight filtered in from the doorway, and though the sun was setting, the rays reached surprisingly far into the cellar, illuminating the whole square patch of it.

The space was small- maybe ten feet on each side, and barely high enough for Brick to stand up without crouching. Shelves lined three of the walls, empty of the preserves they'd been constructed to hold. Brick had never seen the place so clearly. The doors had always been slammed shut and latched behind him, leaving him in darkness. For a moment, he didn't know why Amanda had told him to go down here. There was nothing to see.

Then he realized: nothing.

No mummified corpse had been dragged against a wall, no boy-sized burlap sack tucked under a shelf. There was no loose patch of dirt where his momma might have buried a child. _Nothing_.

Brick's animal shuddered, uncoiling, and a memory rolled free of its grip. Brick saw Emmett crouched in the field, backlit by a setting sun. Both in the field outside the cellar and in Brick's mind, bugs began to sing their hiccup-y songs. Emmett clutched his own shivering arms.

_Please, please come with me. My sister will let you stay,_ he begged.

Brick's momma's voice rose over the shirring insects, shouting, threatening. Something dropped into the grass. Brick's animal used his eyes to look down and fix on the spot of blood in the dirt. The blood was his own, spilled from his split lip.

His animal stared blankly as Emmett continued to plea with him. The other boy grabbed his sleeve and tried to pull him along, crying, but, as Brick's momma closed in, he gave up and disappeared into the dusk. Brick's animal watched him go with reptilian disinterest.

"He ain't here. Oh well," Bool said. "This don't change nothing."

Brick grinned, because Bool was wrong. It changed everything. Amanda, or her image conjured by his own subconscious, had set him free. Emmett hadn't been murdered by Brick, or by his animal.

Emmett had gone home.

"Don't just stand there gawping, boy. Make your choice." Bool's composure was slipping. He bared his teeth in the dying light.

"No."

Bool lowered his head, gaze darkening in the shadows. "Can't say I ain't disappointed."

Before he could phase away, Brick caught him by the collar, as if his grip could keep the ex-bandit from leaping away across the curve of time and space.

"Lemme go," Bool snarled.

"Take me back with you."

"I'm not takin' you nowhere," he growled, but he didn't leave without Brick, either.

A thought struck Brick, so unexpected that it almost seemed to come from someone else. Bool had said his powers worked like a door. If he stepped through while Brick was holding him, he would be dragged along as well. Steeled by the realization, Brick leaned closer, returning Bool's bared teeth with his own mad grin.

"You'll take me," he said, tightening his grip on Bool's collar.

A silver fish of fear swam across the old man's eyes. Just as Brick began to gloat, the cellar blinked out, and both of them tumbled through a void.


	19. The Other Shore

When they emerged, Brick found himself suspended over the field, so high that the literal curve of the planet stretched out below. He kept a white-knuckled grip on Bool as the ground swept up toward them. Bool's coat flapped loudly and the wind rushing past filled Brick's ears with deafening roar, but the old bandit's voice penetrated his mind.

"Worthless git," he taunted. "Damn fool if you don't know the worth of what I'm offerin'. Most folks would kill for it, die for it, but you don't give a shit about nobody but yourself."

Brick couldn't speak with the air ripped from his lungs, so he sent his response to Bool through his mind. _Fuck you._

"I'll take us into the ground," Bool snapped. Even in Brick's mind, the voice was the same: 'tek us inta...'

_No, you won't, 'cos if you do, your boys wont bring you back. They know you're batshit crazy, Bool. They wish you'd die alrea-_

The pain which crippled Brick before shot through his skull again. This time, he couldn't take his hands off Bool to clutch his head, could only grit his teeth and hold on, hold on. An image filled his mind- Rocko, slinky and sultry, as unexpected as the pain.

"In't it weird that he only went to your cell after meeting the girls? Funny, that. Come to think of it, mighty strange how he never told 'bout the Slab girl until you found her picture. She was a pretty little thing."

The ground closed in, faster and faster. Brick's animal twisted in his gut, as much a reaction to Bool's words as the approaching impact, because he could feel what the man was building toward. It radiated like a fever from his mad mind.

"I reckon some part of you knows why they killed the old king."

"You're full of shit!" Brick shouted aloud, and added with his mind; _You're just trying to..._

To draw out his animal. His goddamned self-serving animal, that part of him which wouldn't know to hold on, would strike and release, and leave Brick to smash against the ground while Bool phased to safety.

"What they did to that girl-"

_Shut up!_

"And you led that fox right into the coop, didn't ya? Let him in with your girls. Err'y time they hugged him an' kissed his cheek and wrestled him, he took it back to you, and every time you sucked his dick, he was thinking of their lips."

Bool's words slid into Brick's mind with the cool authority of facts ticking into place. It seemed inevitable, inarguably true. Then a thought struck him like an arc of lightning. _You're so gullible, _Mordecai had said. Brick wondered if he was right. He had no proof one way or the other- only faith.

The grass rushed up, and he shut his eyes, braced for impact. Images flashed behind his lids. The stars in Rocko's black eyes, and how he'd clutched his heart that first time Brick slicked back his hair, like he'd been shot by cupid's arrow. The deadpan lyrics he'd recited, insisting that he wasn't no porcupine, and that Brick could, if he desired, take off his kid gloves...the way he leaned into Brick's touch, and the guileless way he kissed him...

_I don't believe you._

The last jump had been quick, but this time they went with a lurch, a jolt like descending a staircase and expecting one extra step. A vacuum of silence replaced the wind.

Brick found himself floating and sinking, watching a web of lights recede overhead. He realized that Bool had phased them under water. Panic tickled his animal into an upward slide.

Bool spoke again, still in his mind. "They used to call you strong, but you ain't. You're weak. If you'd had the balls the good Lord gave ya, you wouldn't have let those boys string up your dog. She prob'ly thought you'd come for her. You know she would have done for you."

Brick's lungs burned. Bool had known to suck in a breath before the jump, but Brick had been taken off-guard. If he passed out, Bool would simply kick his limp body away.

_You gotta do better, Bool. I think 'bout that every day._

The bandit's frustration throbbed through Brick's skull. He grinned in spite the dark patches growing around the edges of his vision because, through that mottled darkness, he could see Bool struggling. The old bastard had the advantage, but his lungs were weak. Just a little longer...

It might have been Brick's imagination, but Bool's voice seemed fainter when it slithered through his mind again. "You want better?"

The icy water fell away. The last phasing had been uncomfortable, but this was agony: a slow pulling apart that left Brick screaming in a void, unable to do anything but concentrate on keeping his fists bunched around Bool's collar.

When they staggered back into the physical world, a landscape of broken black rock swelled up around them, cracked by slag tributaries. Brick recognized the place as the Eridium Blight. By a ghastly purple glow, Bool looked ragged, worse than ever. His eyes were sunken in bruised sockets, and the hands which scrabbled at Brick's arms were bone thin.

"She died cursing your name," the old bandit said aloud.

An image of Kindle flashed through Brick's mind, and he felt Bool snatch it away. He replaced the stolen thought with a chuckle that made Brick's skull feel like it was full of bees.

"I ain't talking about the girl. I'm talking about her ma."

Brick's animal thrummed and crowded his thoughts, frantic to guard Brick from Bool's words. The sight of sparks in bandit's milky eyes dragged him back. It was the slag, refueling Bool's powers.

"You left her. She never forgot that, boy, not so long as she lived. The apple don't fall far from tree, and when your ma found out about the bun in her oven, she threw her out. She and her boyfriend needed work, any work they could get."

Brick walked Bool back and slammed him against a jut of rock. His hands moved of their own volition—still not breaking contact—to close around the bandit's neck, to tighten around his windpipe and silence him. But Bool wouldn't shut up. He transmuted the words directly into Brick's mind, carving them into his soul.

"Mining on the borderworlds is deadly business, but they take all comers. With a young wife in a family way, the boy didn't have much choice. He died in a cave-in and left her alone with a babe to feed. But Dahl ain't the only ones in need of bodies. There's the Lance."

Red filled Brick's vision, the red of his animal's endless mottled side. It began to unscrew his consciousness like a lid.

_No no no-_

"It weren't nothing personal, though. She was a good soldier, same loyal streak as me. We got on well. But she had Lars in her sights, and I couldn't let shoot one of my boys, so I did what I had to do. I shot her. She died with your name on her lips, Brick. She died crying for her big brother to save her."

It had to be another lie, like the story about Rocko. Amanda never called for Brick to save her, not even as a girl with bullies twice her size. She'd always been to one to protect him.

And yet, Brick's body suddenly felt like a badly tailored suit, the skin cinched in the wrong places, his guts slack and sloppy. His body transformed into a crumbling prison for his animal, one that couldn't contain it. Why? Brick wondered. If it were another lie, why did his animal fight him so hard? The answer perched on the edge of his mind like a hateful, cackling crow. _Because it's true._

Amanda had told Brick in the dream that he knew where she was. Some part of him did know, a part that his animal kept in the dark. He'd glimpsed the truth years ago when he'd talked to Kindle between prayers, about her mother who'd been killed by a fellow Lance soldier. Kindle's mother, Brick's sister. Acknowledgement of that awful truth drove Brick's animal into a frenzy.

_Not an animal_, Brick thought, recalling Mordecai's words in an attempt to will away the beast. _Fugues._

"Slip," Bool said. Not with his lips - those worked soundlessly, gawping for air like a fish - but into Brick's head.

_I can't. I wont. _It was Mordecai who kept Brick's animal at bay now, but not with his assertion about dissociative fugues. A single syllable held Brick together. _Gas. _His last word to the love of his life had been 'gas'.

"It don't matter. He's dead. Just let yerself slip, and it'll all go away."

That was nearly enough to convince the last vestige of Brick's consciousness, but not quite. If there was a chance - a single bitten nail of a chance - that his friend's deaths were just another trick, Brick had to hang on. He had to live long enough to say something besides 'gas' to Mordecai. With that decision, his body seized up. His skin, which had seemed on the verge of sliding off his skeleton, tingled and snapped, drawing taut enough to contain the animal which raged against it.

Brick pressed his thumbs harder against Bool's windpipe and watched those glassy eyes bulge. "So, you murdered my friends, and now you're tellin me you killed my sister, too?" It was his animal's grin that curled across his face, but the loosening sensation had lifted, leaving him in control of both parts of himself. "What's to stop me from killing you?"

Bool's mouth gaped open and a thin wheeze whistled from his throat. Through their joined minds, Brick felt him calling to his animal, trying to lure it out. It burbled back, but Brick locked its door.

"It ain't comin, Bool. You're gonna die here."

The old bandit swung them into one more hard tumble over the curve. They handed in pulsing purple darkness with the crunch of glass under their boots, surrounded by a high counsel of shadow shapes that watched them from tanks.

Bool had returned them to the lab.


	20. Eclipse

Bool shoved with a sudden burst of strength, and they both stumbled back. Brick landed on his shoulder. Shattered glass sliced him, made him bellow and loose his hold around Bool's neck. As soon as his grip relaxed, the bandit rolled aside and blinked out of existence.

"Coward!" Brick cried, staggering to his feet. "Get back here!"

Bool's voice—the moon's voice—filled his head.

_I know where they buried her. One more chance, boy. I can bring her back._

Brick ignored him. He paced down the row and looked into the darkness beyond the tanks, guessing that Bool couldn't be far if he could speak so clearly in his mind.

Bool's boys floated in their tanks, vulnerable without any mutants guarding them. Brick grinned. He hoped that Bool could see it, and that he would feel the weight of his intent. He pressed a command into his digistruct module—Bool had taken his shield but left his HUD band—and caught the beetle black shotgun that zagged into existence.

_Don't you dare, you yellow-bellied, little-prick sonofabitch. You-_

The boom of Brick's shotgun cut off the rest. A tank burst in a spray of glass and fluid. In Brick's mind, Bool screamed as though it had been him suspended in the tube, his body pulped by jagged shards.

Without hesitation, Brick swung around and opened fire on a second tank. It shattered like a bubble popping in slow motion. A tidal wave of liquid rolled over Brick's legs, and he tracked the sticky fluid down the row, smashing one tank after another.

"Who was that, Bool? Is it Kenny? Or Lars?" A broken corpse rolled across the floor on a tide of fluid, and Brick stepped across it. Its half formed bones bent and snapped under his boots. "What about that big talk about protectin your boys?"

Bool gave another mental wail. His distress radiated, so whole and palpable that Brick felt it in his bones.

Someone struck the gun from Brick's hand - Bool, reappeared out of thin air to launch himself at Brick. The flechette gun went skittering across the floor and disappeared in the shadows between the tanks.

Brick struck, but Bool was gone. His knuckles cracked against a tube. A sound barked from the darkness, a hollow crack, and pain ripped through Brick's back and shoulder. He whirled around to see Bool emerge from the shadows. Brick's shotgun winked in his grip.

The gun barked. Brick sidestepped most of the spread, but his flesh screamed where the shards grazed it. Before Bool could squeeze the trigger again, Brick lunged forward and slammed the gun out of his hands. A purple shimmer hung in the air where the bandit had stood.

Brick hurried to where the gun lay and stepped down on the barrel just as Bool reappeared to swipe it. Brick kicked, catching the old bandit's cheek with the bric-a-brak of metal bolted to his boot. The blow sent Bool sprawling backward.

Brick was on him before he could leap away again. He hunched over Bool with a bloody hand clenched around his throat. Bool's eyes wobbled in their sockets.

"You bought your plot in Hell, boy. You put yourself right int'a the stinking mouth of that bird you was always so afeared of."

Brick listened with only one ear. He'd caught another sound, a barely perceptible wuffling. He looked up. Twin moons watched him from the darkness between the tanks. Brick jolted, released Bool and scrambled backward.

Bool misunderstood the source of Brick's fear, thinking his threats had found their mark. He rose to his feet, grinning wide.

"It'll et you up and shit you out, boy, and et you again. You coulda had it all, but you chose Hellfire."

The creature slunk forward, eyes locked with Brick's. He scrabbled for the shotgun, found it, aimed, squeezed the trigger. Bool stumbled aside, but Brick wasn't aiming for him. His target was the creature.

The beast screamed as flechettes cleaved the flesh away from its misshapen skull. The gun kicked again, and a leg with too many joints suddenly had two few, and the beast fell forward to writhe against the tiles, spraying blood.

Bool lunged toward the creature. Its empty eyes rolled, unseeing, as the bandit gathered it into his arms, clutching it tight enough to contain its thrashing.

"Billy, Billy boy, it's alright," Bool murmured against the shattered side of the creature's face. "Go on, now. I'll getcha back. Don't you cry."

The creature wasn't crying, exactly, but made a shrill warbling. Its mouth gaped wide enough that Brick could see a cavity between two of molars in the third row, and the spasming pink muscles of its throat. Bool cradled its slackening body.

The thrashing ceased. Brick thought it had died, but then it struck—its elongated neck coiling and snapping out like a snake's—and latched its teeth around Bool's neck. It let its head drop, and Bool's throat ripped away with a wet sound. He slumped over the creature, dead.

Brick yelled and crab crawled backward, mindless of the glass that stabbed into his palms. The creature—Billy—laid its head in Bool's lap.

It watched Brick with a wary glitter of intelligence in its eye. Brick's animal stared back, and they regarded each other for a long moment. Slowly, Billy's eye closed, waning into a half-moon, a crescent, an eclipse.

Brick bowed his head.

"Brick?"

The voice came from somewhere nearby in the forest of tubes, and Brick's head snapped up.

"Mordy?" he called, hauling himself to his feet. He moved to step around the corpses, both man and monster, but he didn't have to go any further. Mordecai emerged from the purple shadows, Lilith limping just behind.

With a choked sob, Brick stumbled forward to scoop Mordecai into his arms and hug him hard enough to make him squeak. Lilith laughed, and as soon as she wandered into range, Brick stuck out an arm and gathered her into the embrace.

"Where Roland?" he asked, releasing his friends.

"I phased him home," Lilith said. She brushed Brick's bicep with a feather light touch, studying the injuries with a frown. Shards of metal and glass bristled from the wound. "His leg was broken, he couldn't walk, and...he's gonna be pissed, but he's alive."

"You're all alive," Brick said, folding them into another embrace. "I shoulda known he was bluffin'."

"Someone did try to kill us," Mordecai said. "They let that creature in the room while we were passed out. When we woke up, it was just watching us. I don't-" He paused, peering around Brick's shoulder at the bodies on the floor. "Is that...?"

"I didn't murder him," Brick said hurriedly. "He tried to kill me. But I still didn't do it, it was Billy, and—Uh, Billy, that's the mutant, and, oh. Bool was the one watchin us. The moon. And these tank guys, they're-"

"Bool? So the moon was Bool," Mordecai mused.

"He was your friend," Brick said. "I'm sorry."

Mordecai snorted. "I'm an _idiota_. All these years, and I never suspected a thing. I should have...forget it. Did you find Amanda?"

Brick had to look away. "She's dead. Died a long time ago. Remember the girl?"

Lilith looked at him blankly, but Mordecai fingered the security key at Brick's neck. "Kindle?"

"Yeah. Turns out she was my niece."

"God, Brick..." Lilith shook her head. "That's awful."

Mordecai regarded him with a curious look, and Brick realized that he'd lost his goggles at some point. The man's striking green eyes were dark with emotion. He hooked his hands behind Brick's neck, grabbed both necklace chains, and lifted them over his head.

"What're you doin?" Brick asked, and grabbed reflexively to take back the trinkets. Mordecai allowed him to fold his fingers around the necklace, then caught Brick's hand in both of his. The chains tangled around their jumbled fingers.

Mordecai shot a quick glance at Lilith, then returned his gaze to Brick. He wore a peculiar expression- lips pursed, eyes cast down at the necklaces in their shared grasp. Brick was about to repeat his question when Mordecai spoke.

"Um. God, or whoever. Please watch over those two, Brick's _hermana, _and her _hija. _And-"

"Should we be doing this right now? There could be more of those things," Lilith said, but closed her mouth when Mordecai glared at her.

"What was I saying? Right. You've got a couple of great girls up there, and if you don't mind_..._Damn, it really echoes in here, huh?" Mordecai said.

"Did you just say damn to God?" Brick asked.

"No! I said it to you."

A teasing smirk twitched the corner of Brick's lip. "I donno, Mordy. Until you say amen, God's still on the line. You can't just cover the receiver or somethin'."

"Yeah," Lilith said. "That makes sense." She reached out to place her hand over Brick and Mordecai's, snagging a loop of chain around her finger.

"Fine!" Mordecai huffed and rolled his eyes. "Sorry, God, I didn't mean to swear. That good? Everyone good? Okay. I just wanted to...well...I don't know. Brick?"

Brick's eyes closed as he bowed his head. He bent forward far enough that his forehead bumped Mordecai's. The other man was blushing so hard that Brick could feel the feat radiating from him. He chuckled, peeking at Mordecai with one squinted eye.

"Mordy also meant to say sorry for his heathen ways. The killin, the boozin, the loose women-"

"_Baboso_! You're talking to God about loose women? Do you even want to do this? Because I'm not exactly in my comfort zone right now, and if you're just going to make fun of me-"

"Sorry. I'll knock it off." Then, after closing his eyes, Brick went on: "Lord, please take care of Amanda and Kindle. I miss 'em lots, but they got each other now, and you, and someday I'll see them again. Hopefully. And if it ain't too much trouble, look out for my friends. I never woulda gotten here without 'em. Amen."

Brick opened his eyes to find his friends nodding. He poked Mordecai in the chest with his free hand.

"You say it, too."

"Fine," Mordecai said, his blush practically glowing in the dim laboratory. "Amen."

Lilith snickered behind her palm but added her own 'amen' to his. When she phased them back to Sanctuary, Brick could swear he saw movement in the brief void between nothing and something. Just a fleeting, girl-shaped figure that flounced toward a taller shadow - two taller shadows, one twisted and strange, but resting sweetly at the feet of the other - and melding together in the darkness. The real world reasserted itself in shivering color. Something touched his fingers in the half-formed reality. Mordecai, seeking and finding Brick's hand, led him back to the shore.


	21. Sun Dogs

The familiar sensation of loosening swept over Brick as the Fast Travel pulled his molecules apart. He hated that feeling no matter how many times he experienced it, and when his consciousness winked back on the other side, he breathed a sigh of relief.

"I could have just phased us," Lilith said. "It's a smoother ride." She turned to face where she thought Brick and Mordecai were, but guessed wrong and stood oriented away. They smirked at each other over her shoulder.

"And ruin the surprise?" Brick said.

"Besides, you're not supposed to be using eridium," Mordecai added.

"What about you? You're supposed to laying off the booze, and I just heard you open a bottle, so don't get all high and mighty with me."

Mordecai held the open neck of the bottle under her nose. Even from where Brick stood, he picked up the fruity, floral smell of ripe peaches that wafted from it. "Tea."

"Okay, well...okay. Can I take this stupid thing off now?" She plucked at her blindfold, but Brick swatted her hand away.

"No. We ain't there yet."

While Brick and Moredecai guided Lilith between them, Brick considered their surroundings from her perspective. The watery light shining through dense, dark clouds would barely penetrate the blindfold. She could probably smell the electricity in the air, and the mineral scent of rock. They navigated the jagged terrain carefully. Lilith scratched her arm, and Bricked guessed that the remained slag runoff was making her siren marks itch.

The Fast Travel had taken them to the Eridium Fault. Brick had been there earlier and seen the first clouds boiling on the horizon—storm clouds, their bellies heavy with rain—and spill over the mountain.

"How far is it?" Lilith asked, fussing with the blindfold again. Brick didn't stop her this time.

"We're here," Mordecai said. He reached up to untie the strip of fabric, but she was already pulling it down across her face.

"Wow," she breathed.

On cue, the clouds released another convulsive burst of rain, drenching the three friends. It had been raining off and on for hours. Water driving down the mountainside pushed slag ahead of it, rinsing the landscape of its purple taint. Only a few isolated pools of pollution remained. At the base of the wasteland, where the Bright met the Dust, the rain had coaxed vegetation out of the soil. A scattering of green shoots filled the runnels where slag had been. Colorful wildflowers stuck out of the landscape like fireworks.

Lilith stood with her shoulders slack, face upturned into the rain. Steam billowed from her skin. "This feels great."

"Awesome, right? Stuff didn't use to grow here, but Hyperion ain't fucking up the place no more, so-" Brick said, and jabbed his chin toward the growth at the base of the hill.

Mordecai pinched the base of an umbrella and pushed it open. The whoomph of canvas startled Talon off his shoulder. The young bird shrieked and circled overhead, then launched himself back at his master, claws outstretched. Just in time, Mordecai raised the umbrella like a shield. Talon bounced off the taut material and flapped away.

"We're working on that," Mordecai explained.

Brick had packed lunch. The umbrella was the beach variety, and they wandered down the mountain to stake it into the grass. The rain began to pick up just as they ducked underneath. Drops droned against the canvas, and the landscape disappeared behind the nearly opaque sheet of water. The three friends sat in a circle, close enough that their knees touched.

They ate sandwiches and drank bottled tea from their laps, having no room under the umbrella to spread the blanket they'd brought. The drumming rain was too loud to talk over. For awhile they ate in silence, watching the landscape through the shifting curtain of water.

When the rain began to slow, Lilith swallowed the last bite of her sandwich. "I heard you recommended Rocko for Lynchwood's Sheriff position," she said to Brick.

"Yeah. It kinda sucks that we wouldn't be looking after the Slabs no more, but he hates those guys, so it's kind of good. And he was always great at keepin the peace, and people love him..." Brick stopped when he saw the strange look on Lilith's face. "What?"

She hesitated. "Do you think it's a good idea?"

Although she didn't say anything else, Brick knew what she meant. His animal—_not an animal_, he reminded himself—twisted in his gut. With Lilith working on her eridium dependency and Mordecai on his drinking, Brick had decided to try to control his fugues better, and part of that was not personifying his feelings as some unpredictable beast. Still, that 'something' remained, and now it snarled on his behalf.

"That was a trick, Lil. I told you. Bool was just trying to get my ani- to make me lose control. Rocko ain't into kids."

"If you say so," Lilith said, shrugging.

"I _do_ say so. You don't know him like I do. He never looked at the girls that way, ever, and he was plenty interested in me. Even with the Slabs, we didn't have no girls, but it didn't stop him from wanting to do it with me all the time. He was always pawin at m...uhm."

Brick cast a guilty glance at Mordecai. The sniper sat with his knees pulled up to his chest, his sandwich only half eaten and abandoned in the dirt. He scoffed when Brick looked at him.

"Oh, please. You think I didn't know? When you were in Sanctuary, I used to hear you guys screwing like skags every time I tried to stay at the HQ." To Lilith, he added; "So, yeah, Brick's right. That _mamon_ was plenty interested in him."

"Good. I'm glad," Lilith said. And she did seem glad, smiling at Brick from behind the tea bottle she took a swallow from. "So. Since Bool lied about that, do you ever wonder if he was lying about anything else?"

"You mean Amanda," Brick said.

Lilith nodded, and Brick shook his head. About that, he'd never had any doubt. He might have guessed it sooner, but hope and denial had met in his heart, and hadn't allowed him to see the truth until it was spelled out for him.

He stared into the rain. Somewhere in those pitted valleys, there might still be a coat button or footprint or bloodstain preserved in the shelter of an overhang: a memento of Brick's fight with the madman who'd stalked him for four years, who'd taken his friends hostage and shaken his universe. There were still a thousand unanswered questions about Bool: why he'd chosen Brick to take over his legacy, why the eridium had imbued him with siren-like abilities—he'd been even more powerful than Lilith, in the end—but there was no way to know, not for sure, especially since they'd burned his body with the rest of the laboratory.

The _sktch_ of a struck match startled Brick from his thoughts. It was Mordecai, lighting a cigarette. He'd started smoking twice as much since he stopped drinking.

"Those things'll kill you," Brick grumbled.

Mordecai shrugged and took a long drag. "Oh well," he sighed, words made of smoke that floated away and were tramped flat by the deluge. "Something's gonna get me eventually. It might as well be this."

Brick shivered. He was about to argue, but was interrupted by the soaked ball of feathers that dove into the shelter of their umbrella. Talon shook his soggy plumage and glared up at Mordecai.

"Hey, _cabrón_. I knew you'd come around."

The bird kept his eyes locked on Mordecai while it devoured the meat from his discarded sandwich. When he was finished, Mordecai slowly reached down to him. Talon repaid his affection with a hard bite, and he jerked away. He studied the blood trickling from his wounded hand and laughed.

"Just like Blood."

Lilith shot Brick a raised eyebrow. Mordecai rarely talked about Bloodwing, not even to Brick, and not even after Talon hatched. It was unusual for him to mention her name, but Brick was glad to hear it.

"Did it take this long to train her?" he asked.

"I never really trained her. She did whatever she wanted, but it eventually got so didn't want to kill me anymore, and decided to kill the stuff I was trying to kill, instead. I just have to get this little _puto_ on the same page."

Talon glared as if to say, _fat chance_, and flapped back into the rain. The downpour had diminished into a drizzle, allowing Brick to see the landscape past the confines of the umbrella. In the distance, from the direction of the Dust, something was coming toward them. It streaked across the sand, sending up a spray of water and muck behind it. Talon soared to meet the shape.

"It's your damn dog," Lilith said, laughing.

Brick realized she was right. Frank had begun to venture further from the Scrapyard over the last few months. Brick had worried about her at first, but she'd proven that she could take care of herself, becoming the bane of any Hodunks, Zafords, and unaffiliated bandits passing through the greater Dust area.

Skag and bird greeted each other in a madly joyous rush: swooping, leaping, snapping and chasing. Frank and Bloodwing had never gotten along, but Talon had taken a shine to Frank right away. She was surprisingly gentle with the young bird. Although she could easily leap high enough to snatch Talon in her trisected jaws, she fell just short every time.

"You cold?" Mordecai asked. He was talking to Lilith, who had her arms wrapped around herself. Brick could see her trembling.

"Firehawk, remember?" she said with a wan smile.

Without asking, Brick and Mordecai shuffled around, knocked over the umbrella and set it back up, tucked in knees and elbows and feet, and eventually came to sit on either side of Lilith. They crossed their arms around her, guided by muscle memory. After Roland died, Brick and Mordecai still had each other's reassuring heartbeats to wake up to, but Lilith had nobody. After a few long nights of lying awake, listening to her soft weeping—a sound that she'd tried to conceal, but her friends couldn't miss—they'd finally crowded into her bunk. The three remaining vault hunters had slept in a huddle every night since.

Brick figured that someday Lilith would move on, that she'd no longer need to keep her 'best men' so close, but, for now, the friends were inseparable again.

A tightening in his bladder drove him from his thoughts. He untangled himself from his friends and edged out from under the umbrella.

"You okay?" Lilith asked.

"Yeah, I just gotta piss."

"Oh. Go downhill, okay? I don't wanna get caught in the run-off."

Brick chuckled, nodded, and rolled to his feet. A bit further down the slope, a ridge of shiny black rocks caught his eye. Parts of the formation stabbed up at sharper angles, like snaggly fangs in a mouthful of bad teeth. He headed toward those and found a dry hollow on the other side. It would almost be shame to darken the dirt where the rain hadn't reached, but the cove was out of sight of his friends, so it was the natural choice.

He got his belt unbuckled and slung open, and was about to unzip his fly when he heard soft footfalls behind him. He swung around, fists bunched and raised and ready to strike, then saw it was only Mordecai. He forced himself to relax. Relief made his knees into rubber bands.

Mordecai grinned. "Did I scare you?"

"No," Brick grunted, in spite of his still trembling fists.

"I must have, though," Mordecai said—practically purred—as he pulled Brick close, reaching down to steady shaking hands with his own cold fingers. "You've got goosebumps."

"It's the storm," Brick insisted. "Electricity in the air."

"Uh-huh. Sure."

Brick tried to fend him off with a brief but firm kiss, raising one hand to the other man's scruffy jaw. "We should get back. Lil's waitin, and I still gotta piss."

"Want me to hold it for you?"

Brick stammeringly agreed. After he yanked his zipper open and Mordecai dug his cock out of his pants, though, he found the pressure in his bladder was suddenly no match for another pressure: a swelling that Mordecai would certainly feel.

"It's been a long time," Mordecai said.

"I don't mind Lil sleepin with us, but I miss...you know." Brick tried to concentrate on the tightness in lower belly and the loosening he longed for, but the weight of his friend against his back was no help. Mordecai began to squeeze, a rolling kneed from base to head.

"I can't pee while you're doin that."

"You can pee later. We've got unfinished business."

Brick chuckled. "Boy, did that poor kid get a show. You know he tattled to Marcus? He chewed my ear off about it."

"Yeah, I'm still on his shitlist. But I wasn't talking about that."

If Mordecai wasn't referring to the incident in the alleyway next to Marcus's Munitions, the secretive, hurried fuck cut short by the shopkeeper's ward/unpaid employee wandering past at the wrong moment, then Brick didn't know what unfinished business he meant. He didn't ask. Instead, he leaned forward to brace himself against the rock and pressed his forehead to the cool slate.

"The first day I met you," Mordecai answered the unasked question. "I followed you out behind Zed's."

"You wanted to jerk me off," Brick remembered.

"But I lost my nerve. This is just how I pictured it. I ran it through a hundred times that night. How you looked with your back to me, how it would've been to walk up and wrap my arms around you. You've got a skinny waist, you know that? Broad back, but a skinny waist. Perfect for reaching around."

His other hand joined the first to slide up underneath the hem of Brick's shirt, tracing the line of abs with his thumb. The hand around his shaft began to pump with more purpose, eliciting a groan from the man in his grasp. Brick panted, fogging the glassy stone with his breath.

"Just like this...you leaning against the wall, just letting me do it. The thing is, toward the end, I imagined you turning around, grabbing my face and kissing the hell out of me. A real bruiser of a kiss. I'd been staring at that scar on your lip all night, and I wanted to know what it felt like."

"You wanted to kiss me?"

"No. I wanted _you_ to kiss me_._ You made me wait a long time for it."

Reluctantly—so reluctantly—Brick extracted himself from Mordecai's grip. He turned around, slouched back against the stone and gathered the shorter man into his arms, peppering his face with chaste kisses. A chill replaced warmth where Mordecai's hand had been, but was banished between the press of their bodies.

They shared a long, slow kiss beneath the jut of stone, long enough for the rain to pick up around them. The ridge only provided a slim patch of shelter, and a solid sheet of water kept them flush to the rock. Their mouths met with urgency, but with measured passion: a real bruiser of a kiss. Mordecai's hand had drifted back down between them. He stroked Brick's length casually, with a kind of mindless affection that nonetheless had Brick pushing his hips toward him. When they finally parted, Mordecai sighed against his lips.

"Was it like you imagined?" Brick asked.

Mordecai hemmed and hahed for a few seconds. "Well. You're such a big guy, I imaged you'd be, uhm...huge? Not that yours isn't big enough. It's average, and that's perfe-"

"Mordy, what the hell! I ain't talkin about my dick." A furious blush spread across Brick's face, but he tried to recapture his composure. "I meant my scar. You said you wanted to know what it felt like. Is it how you thought it'd be?"

"No," Mordecai said. His fingers fluttered up to trace the curved scar all the way from Brick's cheekbone to his bottom lip. "It looks jagged, like the edges would be sharp or something. But it's soft. You've got the softest lips I ever kissed, _mi pata de perro._"

"Not softer than Moxxi's," Brick said.

"Ten times softer. Like kissing a cloud." He smirked. "A big, scary thunder cloud."

"We should take a trip," Brick said. All at once he'd become overwhelmed by the desire to have Mordecai to himself, to spirit him away to some cramped hotel room overlooking any of Pandora's barren coastlines. Oasis, maybe, or... "The Fathoms. Let's go back to the Fathoms."

"Lilith needs us here," Mordecai said. Brick's rebuttal was to pry himself apart, cram his length back into his pants and zip the fly before Mordecai could stop him. He figured that if Mordecai wanted any, he'd have to ply him with a little romance first.

"Just you 'n me, like we used to. Find one of them tourist trappy hotels, hole up there for a couple'a days. Not long enough for nobody to miss us."

Mordecai hesitated. "Just a few days?"

"Just a week," Brick smiled against Mordecai's neck, and sealed the deal with a spitty suck behind the man's ear. "We'll book the honeymoon suite."

"Nah, Not the honeymoon suite. Then we'd have to get married. That's such a pain, with the invitations and seating charts and color coordinating. Plus, we'd have to kiss in front of everyone. You don't want a bunch of perverts watching us kiss, do you?"

"I'd kiss you in front of anyone," Brick said, suddenly serious. He cupped the gaunt, scruffy side of Mordeaci's face and pressed their foreheads together. "In front of God himself."

"So..." Mordecai swallowed.

"Will you gay marry me?" Brick smiled—a joke, that smile said; If you want it to be, then it's just a joke—but Mordecai didn't laugh.

"Okay," he said. "Yeah, okay. I'll marry you."

Brick's mouth dropped open. An unwelcome and unexpected swell of emotion forced tears to his eyes, and he pressed his face back into Mordecai's neck to hide the gleam. "Then, uh...good."

Mordecai's hand slipped down between them again, but he wasn't reaching for Brick's fly this time. He found Brick's hand and lifted it.

"Waddya doin?" Brick asked. But Mordecai didn't reply, only grasped one of Brick's chunky rinks—the 'one' of his old one-two—and twisted it up over his finger.

He dropped the ring down over the second to last finger of his own left hand. The hoop was too large for his narrow sniper's digits, and he shook his head. "You'll have to get me one that fits. I should warn you, though. I have expensive taste."

Brick honked a laugh that was half-sob. He gathered Mordecai's hands to his face and kissed his knuckles, kissed the sides of his palms and the slopes of his wrists. "I'll get you a ring with a rock the size of your head."

"How about a rock the size of _your_ fat head?" Mordecai bartered.

"Sure. 'course. Whatever you..." Brick trailed off. Something over Mordecai's shoulder had caught his eye, something that made his heart skip a beat.

He hadn't noticed during his exchange with Mordecai, but the rain had slackened again, slowing nearly to a stop. The clouds had begun to loosen, becoming wispy at the seams. The sun peeked through one of the rips. But that wasn't what had Brick slack-jawed and wide-eyed. A second sun sat a short distance away from the first, perfectly parallel, perched on the horizon.

Mordecai craned around to see what Brick was looking at. He stared for a long moment. "Sun dogs," he said.

"Huh?"

"That's what it's called when there's two suns like that. Something about prisms and light, I don't know. But they're called sun dogs."

Brick's gaze remained fixed on the twin suns—_eyes, _he thoughts, _staring back at me—_and reached for his necklace. When his fingers found only the hem on his shirt, he nearly panicked, then remembered that he'd left the trinkets back at the Raider HQ. He hadn't worn the necklace in months. After finding out about Amanda, those memories had finally become too heavy to carry around.

Mordecai leaned back against Brick's chest with a small, contented sigh, and Brick automatically wrapped his arms around him. On the horizon, like the wink of a ghost, the second sun flared out.


End file.
